Comment 13 for bug 48792

Another datapoint:

When upgrading from edgy to feisty, the upgrade manager (running on KDE, if it makes any difference) somehow decided it would be a good idea to install powernowd. In the middle of the configure phase, it was started, and a few seconds later the computer crashed (no video output; the monitor entered its powersaving mode). This had already happened before, when I experimented with powernowd (which I uninstalled after I found out it made the computer crash). Only that this time it left the computer unbootable; for some reason, update-initramfs runs several times during the upgrade (meaning the .bak file is useless), and something (I'm guessing mdadm) got confused (probably because it hadn't been configured yet before the initrd was generated) and booting stopped in the "waiting for root device" line. Luckly, I could still boot with the older 2.6.17-10 kernel, which was untouched at that point (mdadm later regenerated every initrd it could find), and finished configuring everything (and, of course, removed powernowd).

The motherboard is an Asus M2V, and the CPU is an "AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3200+"