With all due respect, the rants and suggestions embedded into the description of your problem do not belong there; they distract and more likely discourage people from reading further. Try the approach of being concise and descriptive. Some thoughts below. If you are booting from _software_RAID_ (any kind) on Linux you need to be very careful. Typically, and I could be wrong here, when booting from a partition, it is not a RAID partition, but a regular partition. Once the kernel is loaded and it is aware of RAID modules, then it does a "chroot" to the partition of the real system -- which is typically not the partition where you booted, but it sure can be. Given that you may be doing software RAID, this may apply to you and it may be a source of confusion. You can test this by stopping grub from botting regularly if you supply the init to be a bash prompt and then you can do the usual querying with 'df -h' to find out what is going on (i.e. what CentOS's setup is trying to do at boot time). I am not sure what to suggest first... It would be great if we have a partition table and a /boot/grub/grub.conf copy to look at... It is hard to tell from your description. Try botting manually, byt typing everything in the prompt, from the source disk to everything else you need. On failure it will just give you back the prompt and you can "reset" and try again instead of watching it hang after boot. Good luck!