Comment 7 for bug 1371564

statd should not depend on any filesystems other than the root filesystem and the virtual filesystems. If it does, that's a regression in statd.

I do notice that '$ strings /sbin/rpc.statd |grep /' includes a reference to '/var/lib/nfs', so this could be the problem.

Two different things you could try for debugging:

 - create a /var/lib/nfs directory on your root filesystem (sudo mount -obind / /mnt; sudo mkdir -p /mnt/var/lib/nfs; sudo umount /mnt)
- set STATD_OPTS="-F -d" in /etc/default/nfs-common

The first of these will let you debug whether the mount ordering is the cause of the failure. The second should get you more useful output in /var/log/upstart/statd.log. (But you will need to undo it once you're done debugging, since this will interfere with upstart's service readiness detection for statd.)