I am also hit by this bug in Debian Jessie 8. I got it in a virtualized Virtualbox machine with one virtual disk (VDI file) and one disk attached through USB where the root was located on a md device.
The first error message that appeared was: Gave up waiting for root device It is not mentioned in this bug report so if people search for the message they won't find it, until now hopefully. I used the workaround described on serverfault which works for now. Adding bootdegraded=1 and such to the kernel command line does not work. I don't know if it has to do with mdadm but before trying to detach one of the disks (to test an eventual disk failure) I in fact had problems with mdadm not waiting for the slower USB disk to become available. I solved this by adding rootdelay=1 to /etc/default/grub I changed this line: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet" To this: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet rootdelay=15" And then I ran update-grub. I consider this as a critical bug. RAID1 systems which should be more fail tolerant may currently not boot in Debian Jessie 8 if one of the disks are out of order. r
