Added the new drives but borked boot

For some reason, I thought I would have to remove debian's version of dmraid
and install my custom version after changing pdc.h.  I ran update-initramfs,
but the system wouldn't boot ("waiting for root file system").  I wound up
having to install the debian version and then replace libdmraid.a with my
updated version.  Did I do something badly wrong, or is there something about
debian that initramfs only bothers with official "debian" packages?

Bob