Comment 104 for bug 120375

On Monday 18 August 2008, Ross Becker wrote:
> One more comment on this; I can understand the "conservative"
> behaviour, but when an array was degraded, the boot process halted with
> NO MESSAGE indicating what was wrong. Please whatever you do, even in
> the case of maintaining "conservative" behavior, emit a message telling
> the user why you're not continuing the boot process.

I totally agree.

The system seems to hang at a certain point, and when you wait long enough
(180s as far as I understand from this discussion) and then drops you
into initramfs.

I tried 999 different ways of modifying grub, fstab, mdadm.conf becasue I
didn't know WHY the system couldn't boot.

The fact was that I very well KNEW the array was degraded, too. A warning
message would have helped tremendously.

Also, since there is no message and no indication of what was wrong, I had
a very hard time finding this thread. I almost exploded when I found the
thread, saw it's age, and all the possible workarounds, and the fact that
it is not a problem in Debian.

This behaviour really and very strongly diminishes my trust in Ubuntu as a
system for my servers.

Just a question: have you any idea how many systems are affected? The
popularity contest says:
 mdadm 25199 5566 19467 156 10