I've just fin­ished mi­grat­ing my sys­tem to a new hard disk, and boy, it has been a re­al pain in the ass. A tru­ly hor­rif­ing, six hour fight with boot load­ers and yaird. For the most part, I've been en­coun­ter­ing the above er­ror mes­sage:

/usr/lib/yaird/run_ex­ec: open­ing con­sole: no such file or di­rec­to­ry

To all you hack­ers out there: Con­trary to in­tu­ition, this mes­sage (re­ceived just af­ter / was mount­ed) does not nec­es­sar­i­ly im­ply there is any­thing wrong with the ini­tial ramdisk. In my case, the ini­trd was fine – but I didn't know that udev can't cre­ate /dev/con­sole or /dev/null, thus you have to pre-make them on your root par­ti­tion (see mkn­od).