Comment 34 for bug 576001

Charles, that's definitely a bug. I believe there have been efforts in Plymouth to fix it but you need to the splash screen for those error messages to be displayed. A default server install, or one where the kernel is instructed to boot with as much text output as possible (GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text" in /etc/default/grub), apparently has no way to display such messages.

However, that seems to be a completely different issue altogether. In my experiences posted above there were no special or additional entries in /etc/fstab whatsoever and even pressing "s" or "m" when the server hung did not do anything. It was just a default install of the Ubuntu server edition.

On a related note: I've now finally gotten back two servers of the kind that had the problems described earlier in this thread. I will test them extensively this week. It also seems that running a -generic kernel really helps. One machine that had to go into production also runs a -server kernel but it is 2.6.32-23-server (not -22-server) and on the (very few) reboots I did on it no hangs would occur. So maybe this has fixed itself but I'll know more after this week.