Bug#548290: further investigation

[Christophe Rhodes <csr21@cantab.net>]

Hi,

I needed to reboot the machine with these symptoms again today, so I
spent a little time at the initramfs shell.  I made the following
observations; I don't know which of them are relevant, if any:

- The message when the shell starts is along the lines of 
  "ALERT! /dev/disk/by-uuid/408abe9e-7410-46f8-bf91-faea6ec38fac does not exist"
  not only does this not exist, but neither does the /dev/disk/by-uuid/
  directory at all.  There are entries corresponding to my hard disk in
  /dev/by-id/ and /dev/by-path/.

- /dev/hda and the relevant partitions (/dev/hda1 &c) are present in
  /dev/

- attempting to mount /dev/hda1 (my root filesystem) without specifying
  the filesystem type (with the -t argument to mount) does not work;
  however, explicitly specifying -t ext3 allows me to mount the
  filesystem.

- I'm not sure, but it's possible that this (2.6.30-2-686) is the first
  kernel I have installed since running update-from-grub-legacy.

At this point, I suspect I could work around this problem by using
/dev/hda1 as my root; I only have one IDE disk, so it's not like it's
going to get renumbered very often.  On the other hand, I'd also quite
like to help fix the bug properly, but if I haven't yet provided enough
information to locate it I will need some direction as to how to provide
better information.

Cheers,

Christophe