Well, the upgrade to Intrepid went smoothly during the install process itself. However after a reboot, the system hung partially through boot and dropped to a initramfs shell claiming “cannot find root device /dev/disk/by-uuid/50128bb8…” and “Gave up waiting for root device.” Wonderful. Tinkered around a bit, tried mounting drives manually only they were not listed in /dev. Attempted booting old 2.6.24-18 kernel which worked fine. Aha, so it’s something related to new kernel. Did a quick search which revealed the following bug:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/290153
Apparently on certain hardware the kernel has a bug which causes a long timeout for the SCSI/SATA bus. It took a good 2-3 minutes on my system but when I left it idle while I was reading the bug report on my desktop system, a bunch more lines flew by from the initramfs prompt about ata bus reset and detecting new drives. After that a simple ‘exit’ from prompt continued a normal boot.
It’s a fairly important bug but at least a workaround exists. I’ve tinkered with adding the ‘rootdelay’ option to my menu.lst but have not found the best match yet. Maybe I’ll just leave it as is, my server almost never gets rebooted. You’re instilling me with a lot of confidence doc, I mean Intrepid. Definitely going to make a full backup of my desktop machine before attempting upgrade on that one.