Bob,
I'm seeing this also, after installing using the Debian 8.0
installer and dist-upgrade'ing to unstable (using the SMP kernel trick
to get past the GENERIC issue). My understanding is that it's not
initramfs-tools that mounts all the (non-root) local filesystems, but
systemd (which it looks like you've reported as a bug elsewhere). I was
able to pseudo-fix this by changing the fs_passno field in /etc/fstab to
'0'. Now, systemd happily mounts all the local filesystems at boot, and
I no longer get dropped to the emergency shell. So, the trouble seems to
be with running fsck on these fs, but I've no idea what the cause may be.
Couple other things I found: in /etc/network/interfaces,
"allow-hotplug eth0" doesn't seem to work nicely with systemd, but "auto
eth0" does.
Samba isn't installable, and in fact I can't even build-dep to
build myself locally; looks like the dependency chain goes all the way
back to a specific version of libboost!?!?
Thanks,
-Alex