I am having problem with my boot. It does work, but it hangs for about 3 minutes halfway through.

I have a so-called fakeraid setup (RAID-0) using dmraid (a Silicon Image 3112 chip). It worked fine under Ubuntu Dapper, but I have now updated to Ubuntu 6.10.

As this setup don't need LVM I have removed it from my machine, but the thing still starts up and make my boot hang for those 3 minutes!
Far as I can see dmraid depend on some of the libraries used by LVM, so I can only guess thats the LVM process gets started from there.

I tried to install a new kernel 2.6.19-1, thinking that it was something in the 2.6.18 kernel that caused this problem, but the mkinitrd comes with an error: unknown DM device.

I suspect these two things are somehow connected.

But what? And how to fix it?

Thanks,
Mons

have you ever run a personal config file and re-compiled your kernel to your hw and sw needs?

Personal config file? What do you mean? I guess that's a no.
My attempt at 2.6.19 is the first kernel compilation I have done. My need for that initrd.img file complicates matters a bit...

yes the reason for having compiled your own hardware and partition types etc into your kernel removes the need to have a initial ram disk image.....distros have to work for all hardware (up to a point) so they mainly do it with a ramdisk image and lots of modules.....when you build a kernel with no or few modules....the kernel is bigger but imho is better as no initrd line in your bootloader and you have tweaked your kernel so should be tiny bit faster on a modern computer and faster on old hardware.

Your ubuntu site should have a kernel config doc.