Bug#612402: same problem, detailed recovery steps

[Daniel Pocock]

I had the same problem on a squeeze-wheezy upgrade test today.  I have
same setup as original poster, using root=UUID=xxxxx

I have raised the severity to critical, because the definition of a
critical bug includes any bug that causes the whole system to break
(even if there is no loss of data).  This could impact many users when
wheezy is released.  At a bare minimum, if UUID is no longer supported,
it should be detected and the upgrade should abort with a meaningful error.

update-initramfs didn't give any error during upgrade

After upgrade, I did a reboot test

Boot failed, dropping me in the busybox shell with the "Gave up waiting
for root device" message

It was not necessary to use any recovery CD, in busybox, I just did:

lvm
vgchange -ay
exit
exit

and it continued booting from there

After booting, it is necessary to take these steps to fix (workaround)
permanently:

Edit /etc/default/grub, make sure this setting is present:
GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

After changing the setting, run

update-grub
update-initramfs -u

and then reboot and it comes up normally.

Here are the versions of related packages:

# dpkg --list | egrep 'lvm|initramfs|grub' | tr -s ' ' | cut -f2,3 -d' '
grub 0.97-66
grub-common 1.99-22.1
grub-doc 0.97-66
grub-legacy-doc 0.97-66
grub-pc 1.99-22.1
grub-pc-bin 1.99-22.1
grub2-common 1.99-22.1
initramfs-tools 0.107
libklibc 2.0.1-1
liblvm2app2.2:amd64 2.02.95-4
lvm2 2.02.95-4