Comment 61 for bug 872220

I thought it helpful to link to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mdadm/+bug/917250 which seems related, although pertains specifically to racing conditions leading to disks being erroneously degraded rather than legitimately degraded, but irrelevant disk causing inappropriate boot failures.

It's stating the obvious but I found I could boot normally with degraded softraid disks by uninstalling mdadm, which removes the mdadm scripts from the /usr/share/initramfs-tools folder and the initrd image.

I'll try to find a fix for my problem, by hacking about with the mdadm scripts added to initramfs-tools, but suspect this issue is best tied to the mdadm package, where said scripts originate.