Some time ago I noted the same problem on Debian hosts having root file system on software RAID. After each kernel upgrade Debian cannot boot, complaining on inaccessible root FS. As I figured, the problem was in generating initrd.img for new kernel. So, after each kernel upgrade it was necessary to run mkinitrd by hand. It just works, if you don’t forget to do it between kernel upgrade and reboot, so I leave it as is for that moment.

In RAID setup time all subject systems were configured so:

• in /etc/kernel-image.conf was line do_initrd = yes (for initrd.img creation after new kernel install or upgrade)
• in /etc/mkinitrd/modules was line raid1 (for automatic inclusion of raid1 module to new initrd.img)
• in /etc/mkinitrd/mkinitrd.img was line MODULES=dep (for automatically including all the moduless needed for system boot-up)

Tomorrow doing other maintenance tasks i I also solved this issue. It was caused by changes in ‘initramfs-tools’ package, that introduce set of tools parralel to mkinitrd. The kernel package install script uses ‘mkinitramfs-kpkg’ tool that looks for config files in /etc/initramfs-tools folder. There are ‘initramfs.conf’ file that is functionally equal to ‘mkinitrd.conf’, and also ‘modules’ file. After modyfying both in the same fasion as older mkinitrd configs.. all works great.

Tags: Debian, RAID