Hardware is a Dell R210 with a USB-attached disk and an LSI RAID-1 card. We used the 64bit minimal install cd to get started and we are presented with /dev/sda being the USB disk and /dev/sdb being the Dell Virtual Disk (RAID).
All works fine booting linux-generic. Install linux-server and reboot.
During boot the screen clears and we're presented with
fsck from util-linux-ng 2.17.2
/dev/sdb1 : clean, xxxx/yyyyyy files, xxxx/yyyyy blocks
And nothing more. We have to send Ctrl+Alt+Del which shuts things down, then select the linux-generic image to get past this problem.
The final thing we see prior to the the above message is something about init-bottom or something similar.
Am going to attach a dmesg from the generic kernel boot. No such dmesg appears using the -server kernel boot (we checked timestamps of the files in /var/log/).
jamesg@graves:/var/log$ dpkg -l | grep linux-
ii linux-firmware 1.34 Firmware for Linux kernel drivers
ii linux-generic 2.6.32.22.23 Complete Generic Linux kernel
ii linux-headers-2.6.32-22 2.6.32-22.33 Header files related to Linux kernel version
ii linux-headers-2.6.32-22-generic 2.6.32-22.33 Linux kernel headers for version 2.6.32 on x
ii linux-headers-generic 2.6.32.22.23 Generic Linux kernel headers
ii linux-image-2.6.32-22-generic 2.6.32-22.33 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86
ii linux-image-2.6.32-22-server 2.6.32-22.33 Linux kernel image for version 2.6.32 on x86
ii linux-image-generic 2.6.32.22.23 Generic Linux kernel image
ii linux-image-server 2.6.32.22.23 Linux kernel image on Server Equipment.
ii linux-server 2.6.32.22.23 Complete Linux kernel on Server Equipment.
Overnight new kernels were issued. I decided to uninstall linux-*server packages, then dist-upgrade which brought in -generic updates.
I rebooted sucessfully, indicating this is restricted to a problem in the -server packages themselves. Assigning to package 'linux' for lack of other suggestions.