Install of Ubuntu 8.10 server unbootable

[Mark Kirkwood]

I've decided to try out Ubuntu 8.10 server on an older machine I have 
here. It is a Supermicro P3TDER with a Promise TX4000 raid adapter.

I had previously had a different flavour of Linux installed on it with 
several raid arrays created via mdadm. I thought I would leave these as 
is, and install Ubuntu into them (i.e. format them as use them for 
/boot, /, /usr, /var  ...)

While the install itself went fine, the system will not reboot. I get a 
message saying that md2 (/dev/md2 - the would be root) does not exist 
and then the busybox prompt. Attempting a  boot in rescue mode goes a 
little further but says that all the arrays are "stopped". I've tried 
experimenting with "rootdelay" in the grub config, but to no avail. It 
looks as tho I have RAID and Promise SATA loaded (looking at /proc/modules).

I figured that I may have corrupted the arrays somehow, so I booted from 
the cd, and picked "rescue broken installation", and from there "create 
a shell on root" - and chose /dev/md2 as root. This works fine, I can 
mount all the other filesystems successfully as well.

I have /boot as ext3 but everything else is xfs.


Any suggestions?

Mark