My original post to this bug report may have confused the issue I had
with the main kernel to the issue I had with the backports kernel. When
I came back to the system at a later date the monitor was turning off
when booting with a the jessie kernel while the storage problem was
happening with the backports kernel.
The issue with the monitor seems to be graphics card related. I saw the
same issue on a another machine where I had just upgraded the graphics
card to a GTX 750 Ti. Some stuff I found online indicated that it was
caused by the kernel's graphics card drivers incorrectly switching to
the onboard graphics and could be fixed by disabling onboard graphics in
the bios. That somewhat worked for the machine where I upgraded the
graphics card but it did not work for the machine I filed this
installation report for.
The workaround I found that did work was renaming /lib/modules/<kernel
version>/kernel/drivers/gpu so the kernel couldn't load any graphics
card drivers. This lead to a system that was usable but with the screen
stuck in a low resoloution (IIRC 1024x768, I guess X was using the vesa
driver).
The storage related issue seemed to go away with a newer backports
kernel so I think we can consider that one resolved.
To get the display working in it's native resoloution I installed the
nvidia binary driver.
