Upgrading to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS

I was wanting to upgrade my home server from Ubuntu 6.04 LTS (Long Term Server) to the newer 8.04 LTS version. I did the standard update commands for a working server.

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade

Everything was going well until it came time to actually reboot the server. When the server came back up it was thrown into BusyBox mode and I had a command line prompt. There was a missing /dev/md0 device which is my RAID-5 array where /home is mounted. I could log into the machine and get the RAID back up and running using the commands:

modprobe md
mdadm -As
mount -a

The RAID disks were all fine and in a clean shutdown mode before this started so that wasn't a problem. All the fstab and mdadm.conf files were converted over to the new UUID format and those were all fine as well. So the main problem was that the server would no longer finishing booting without human interaction and would not auto mount the RAID. As it turns out the upgrade messed up the init ram disk image and didn't include the md (multi disk) module. The solution was to rebuild the init ram disk with the following command:

update-initramfs -u

Then since my grub configuration was not set to this new generic image, I had to update my grub menu in /boot/grub/menu.lst. Since the generic entry was already in my menu I just set it to the default item by changing the line:

default 0

to:

default 2

Once the machine was rebooted, the RAID was mounted at boot time and everything works once again.