That did it. I am assuming that the system was just in the process of
changing from the initrc to the actual running system? But how do I get the
boot sequence to activate the LVs automatically each time before attempting
to mount the / filesystem?
AFAIK you don't need to do anything special for that.
>From what I can tell, the initramfs (tries to) activate the swap and
root LVs, and then the rest of the boot activates them all.
If that doesn't work for you, you're going to have to dig deeper,
Stefan