I still do not understand why failure to find a filesystem that won't be needed before switchroot is complete at the earliest can hang a boot in a dracut emergency shell. The non-intuitive extra complication restoring from backups or migrating disks is why I reported this. Yes, the workaround works, but why is it needed for boot to continue? Same question re root filesystem, since by default and tradition every bootloader stanza contains root= that overrides root= in initrd. Logic tells me these two dracut elements should be complementary fallbacks, not mandatory. It seems like otherwise rd.hostonly=0 should be included on every Grub linu line that contains root=.