I actually just solved this... COMPLETELY BY ACCIDENT. I now have a fully-booting system with zero harddrives. What happened was, originally (as in three, four days ago) I was seeing this message: mount.nfs: Either use '-o nolock' to keep locks local, or start statd So I fixed that by adding 'nolock' to the mount options in fstab. THAT WAS BREAKING IT. I changed it back to defaults and now no problem. Now to convert my media center!!! (: -Yaron --