Comment 3 for bug 744586

This is so basic I feel like an idiot. For some unknown reason dmraid was removed from my updated system which had it from inception, and never included in the latest fresh install. Needless to say, without dmraid both the latest upgrade and fresh install are not bootable. I fixed it by installing dmraid to the updated system while running on the 2.6.38-7 kernel. It now boots and runs normally on the latest kernel.

I seemed to be able to access all my raid partitons with an earlier kernel without dmraid? Grub-probe would not however locate any of the other raid systems in any of the other raid partitions (same with grub-update).

This does explain why the system droped to an initramfs at boot. The system could not find itself (the UUID of the RAID drive installed to) when booting transitioned to the ramfs.