After a recent dist-upgrade, I failed to mount /boot when rebooting. Further investigation shows that /dev/disk/by-path has an entry for my /boot as /dev/sda (rather than sda1). Updating to use the by-id in /etc/fstab solves the problem, but I'm curious what changed and if this is a known issue. I would guess that this is an issue with changes in either udev or the kernel.
The partition table is a Sun disk label, which means that /dev/sda1 starts at sector 0 and the filesystem header thus starts in the same place as if there were no partition table. I believe on my e450 that this is in fact required for the boot partition, so I don't know that there's an easy fix in the installer aside from defaulting to one of the by-id options. Copy/paste of relevant information below: ---------------------------------------------------------- root@alexandria:~# grep boot /etc/fstab # /boot was on /dev/sda1 during installation #UUID=e952f794-4d8e-4bba-8c5a-851acdb5e886 /boot ext2 defaults 0 2 /dev/disk/by-id/wwn-0x5005076506c6bd8a-part1 /boot ext2 defaults 0 2 root@alexandria:~# ls -l /dev/disk/by-uuid/ total 0 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 27 18:26 6194b363-9f57-401b-a3cb-ee4bc8895323 -> ../../sda2 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 10 Oct 27 18:26 704f946c-b8e8-4a00-9d18-c49b325cd7e3 -> ../../sda4 lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Oct 27 18:26 e952f794-4d8e-4bba-8c5a-851acdb5e886 -> ../../sda root@alexandria:~# blkid /dev/sda4: UUID="704f946c-b8e8-4a00-9d18-c49b325cd7e3" TYPE="swap" /dev/sda2: UUID="6194b363-9f57-401b-a3cb-ee4bc8895323" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" /dev/sda3: UUID="e952f794-4d8e-4bba-8c5a-851acdb5e886" BLOCK_SIZE="1024" TYPE="ext2" PTTYPE="sun" /dev/sda1: UUID="e952f794-4d8e-4bba-8c5a-851acdb5e886" BLOCK_SIZE="1024" TYPE="ext2" PTTYPE="sun" root@alexandria:~# parted /dev/sda p Model: IBM DDYST1835SUN18G (scsi) Disk /dev/sda: 18.1GB Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B Partition Table: sun Disk Flags: Number Start End Size File system Flags 1 0.00B 512MB 512MB ext2 boot 2 512MB 17.1GB 16.6GB ext4 4 17.1GB 18.1GB 1025MB linux-swap(v1) root@alexandria:~# ----------------------------------------------------------