The mdadm race problem has bitten me several times.
Sometimes putting timing waits helps. Sometimes referring to the
filesystem differently in the fstab helps. (/dev/sdc vs UUID=)
Sometimes adding a bootwait option helps.

Search for mdadm and race.

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013, Yaron wrote:

> They get MOUNTED after the OS boots. I think mdadm tries to start the array 
> up well before that, for some reason it fails and dumps me into busybox. I'm 
> not entirely sure what exactly is going on, really, RAID's never been my 
> thing.
>
> On Thu, 21 Mar 2013, Mike Miller wrote:
>
>> But if it fails after the OS is done booting, why does it dump you into 
>> busybox?  I think that happened to me only when my updated kernel was not 
>> being found because it had been written to the wrong partition.  That 
>> shouldn't happen in a brand-new setup, though.  Under what conditions does 
>> busybox make an appearance?
>> 
>> Mike
>> 
>> 
>> On Thu, 21 Mar 2013, Yaron wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm not using a partition table on the RAID device at all, but that's moot 
>>> since I'm not booting off it. It gets mounted well after the OS is done 
>>> booting... but it makes the boot process hang for random reasons.
>>> 
>>> On Thu, 21 Mar 2013, Mike Miller wrote:
>>> 
>>>> On Wed, 20 Mar 2013, Yaron wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Ok, I've been running a software RAID5 on one of my older systems for a 
>>>>> while. Almost every time I reboot, it claims the RAID is degraded and 
>>>>> dumps me into busybox, where all I can really do is exit and HOME it'll 
>>>>> see the drives next time I reboot. This is solved by rebooting anywhere 
>>>>> from 2 to 20 times.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I figured it was this system or these harddrives or this SATA controller 
>>>>> or... whatever. But I just set up a brand new RAID array on a brand new 
>>>>> machine using brand-new drives and a brand-new array, etc, etc. Same 
>>>>> exact issue.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Anyone have ANY idea if this is ME doing something wrong, or what?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> I don't really know anything except that the tricky part of making my 
>>>> RAID 1 work was figuring out how the boot partition is supposed to be set 
>>>> up. I didn't get that right and then after a kernel update it wouldn't 
>>>> reboot unless I went back to the earlier kernel.  That might be 
>>>> irrelevant, but judging from things I was reading on web forums and 
>>>> advice I was getting, this is a tricky issue.  With larger drives (more 
>>>> than 2.2 TB) we have to use GPT instead of MBR and then all kinds of 
>>>> little annoyances come along. Are you using GPT?
>>>> 
>>>> Mike
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>>>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>>>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
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>>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
>> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
>> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>> 
>
>
>
> --
> _______________________________________________
> TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota
> tclug-list at mn-linux.org
> http://mailman.mn-linux.org/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list
>

-- 
Gerry Skerbitz
gsker at skerbitz.org