kernel panic not syncing vfs unable to mount root fs on unknown block oo swapper not tainted

Question

I updated my laptop (Ubuntu) to 11.10 and I don't know what went wrong that when I restarted the computer It would start and it would only tell me.

kernel panic not syncing vfs unable to mount root fs on unknown block oo swapper not tainted...

I am a new user and I have no idea what to do. Any ideas?

score 9 · Answer 1 · edited Aug 27 '13 at 12:03

9

You are missing the initramfs for that kernel. Choose another kernel from the grub menu, or run update-initramfs -u -k version to generate the initrd for version then update-grub.

Boot to a LiveCD, select Try Ubuntu and then open a a terminal. Run the following:

sudo fdisk -l

This will show us what partitions are available. You need to look for your main Ubuntu partition. On most fresh-installed systems this will be sda1 but it really could be anything. Substitude sda1 in the following with whatever you decide is right in the fdisk output.

sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo mount --bind /run /mnt/run
sudo chroot /mnt

And now you can run update-initramfs and update-grub with out errors and that should fix everything. Reboot without the CD in and you should land on your Ubuntu desktop.

Additionally, after the chroot:

cp -r /usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu/pango /usr/lib/

update-initramfs -u -k 2.6.38-8-generic #(or your version)
update-grub2

(You can find a list if installed kernels using: dpkg --list | grep linux-image) And reboot your system

edited Aug 27 '13 at 12:03

Oli

293,335

answered Mar 29 '12 at 06:37

dilip

91

+1 this worked for me after crashed Virtual machine. I just mount , updated-initframfs and update-grub2. I checked last kernel version in /boot/grub/grub.init. – ralu Apr 04 '12 at 13:16
Awesome! This worked perfectly. I only had a Knoppix Live CD available, but it still worked great. – N.C. Weber Mar 29 '13 at 02:30
I cannot even get to the command line in recovery mode in order to execute these commands. What do I do? – IgorGanapolsky Mar 02 '15 at 15:44
1

This worked for me. Booted using other kernel, and ran the above commands – Jay Dharmendra Solanki Nov 07 '15 at 18:20

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Jan 02 '14 at 21:24

Get/burn an installation CD with a linux system.
Booted from this CD (may need to press F12 (or other key) to choose boot option).
Mount the old file system on, I use:

Code:
```
mount -t ext4 /dev/sda1 /mnt
```
In ROOT account, went to my boot volume (at /mnt/boot/grub) and edited "grub.conf" so that (A) I would see the menu and (B) it would give me a few seconds to choose and option:

Code:
```
timeout=10
#hiddenmenu
```
Rebooted (from the hard disk this time).
Chose the second kernel (not the most recent broken one).
It worked!
So, then I went back to grub (now at "/etc/grub.conf", which is soft linked to "/boot/grub/grub.conf") and edited it to comment out (or remove) the lines relating to the broken kernel:

Code:
```
# title Fedora (2.6.40-4.fc15.i686)
#        root (hd0,0)
#        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.40-4. ......
```

I noticed this stanza does not have "initrd ..." line. Maybe that's why it couldn't boot.

kernel panic not syncing vfs unable to mount root fs on unknown block oo swapper not tainted

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