Re: jessie won't install/boot on a Dell Poweredge R815

[Jeffrey Mark Siskind <qobi@purdue.edu>]

Please note that bootint with rootdelay=20 does not solve the problem. It only
masks it.

 1. If I attempt a fresh USB install of jessie, when md0 is correctly built
    before the install, the process of doing the fresh install breaks
    md0. When it gets to grub install, components of md0 are missing (even
    though all six components were present before the install). And
    grub-install fails. At this point it is impossible to complete the install
    and produce a bootable system.

 2. If I do a fresh minimal USB install of wheezy, rebuilding md0 in the
    process, and then do a dist-upgrade to jessie, I can manually add
    rootdelay=20 in grub and boot into jessie with all six components of md0
    present. But if I do so, then after boot, if I do dpkg-reconfigure pc-grub,
    doing that gives errors, drops components of md0, precludes me from adding
    them back, fails to install grub, and leaves the machine in an unbootable
    state.

I fear that there is a problem writing to disk. Even if I boot with
rootdelay=20, unless the kind of writes that dpkg-reconfigure pc-grub does are
different, doing ordinary writes to disk may also corrupt the disk.

Please let me know what new information you would like me to gather.

    Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)