I actually just solved this... COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT. I now have a 
fully-booting system with zero harddrives.

What happened was, originally (as in three, four days ago) I was seeing 
this message:

   mount.nfs: Either use '-o nolock' to keep locks local, or start statd

So I fixed that by adding 'nolock' to the mount options in fstab.

THAT WAS BREAKING IT. I changed it back to defaults and now no problem.

Now to convert my media center!!! (:




-Yaron

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