(Please excuse my clumsy description) The genkernel initrd sets up the crypto-root and mounts /. After the handover from the genkernel initrd, there is no file /dev/mapper/root. All the other filesystems set up in /etc/conf.d/dmcrypt have there /dev/mapper entries as symlinks to /etc/dm-* In /etc/fstab, / is referenced as /dev/mapper/root. Now the /etc/init.d/fsck tries to check the filesystems but doesn't find /dev/mapper/root and aborts without checking ANY filesystem at all. Reproducible: Always Expected Results: 1. /dev/mapper/root should be present 2. fsck should at least check the other filesystems that are "accessible" Point 1. can be fixed by calling "dmsetup mknodes" which will create the missing entries in /dev/mapper. As a hotfix it could be added to start() in /etc/init.d/device-mapper. That worked for me.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 344407 ***
