I conjecture that there may be two to five separate issues.
1. Setting up md0 upon boot takes a long time. rootdelay=20 fixes this.
2. There is a problem writing to disk. Perhaps just writing to certain blocks.
Because even when the machine boots with rootdelay=20, and md0 has all 6
components, grub-install fails and causes md0 to drop some/most of its
components.
Both of these are observed with a dist path-upgrade from a fresh USB install
of wheezy to jessie. Separate from this, there are two other errors observed
with a direct fresh USB install of jessie.
3. Can't find the ISO.
4. grub-install
This may be the same as (2) above.
This is yet distinct from the fact that
5. a fresh direct USB install of jessie on the Dell Poweredge C6145s takes a
really long time (an hour) for each hardware probe (three times, once
before finding the ISO, once before partitioning, and once before grub
install).
Jeff (http://engineering.purdue.edu/~qobi)
