Comment 15 for bug 962764

Not so sure this is a duplicate. There are certainly a lot of strange effects on precise related to the rescue shell when PXE booting with NFS root device. Changing the gfxpayload as mentioned in #864466 has no effect here.

I am booting precise via PXE with NFS root device and can't get to a initramfs rescue prompt at all after a certain point in the boot process. Basically I want to drop into busybox shell in my aufs / overlayfs script to analyze some problems. I tried to open a shell in the relevant script (in nfs-bottom) as well as the break=bottom option and the rescue shell is always blocked by the splash screen (with quiet and splash removed, also tried nosplash).

If I use break=top (again without quiet and splash) I can get to a rescue shell on some machines, on other machines I can see the (initramfs) prompt, then some more kernel messages appear and everything blocks. On an almost identical local installation (local disk and users instead of LDAP/Kerberos/NFS) the break option works fine. I am not sure I fully understand what is going on here and want to make sure that I have a better idea of what is going on before filing a bug report.