What kind of hard drives is in this machine? I suspect the issue is that the devices generated by udev did not show up in time. It is an old problem which have become more common as the kernel become more and more non-blocking and asynchronous.
What kind of other hardware configuration are these computers using? Can you provide a boot log (enabled using /etc/default/bootlogd). Does it help to add a pause (like sleep 5) before fsck? Btw, I doubt this issue affect all users of initscripts, and if it only affect some machines, the severity should probably be important instead of grave. Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-rc-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org