Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Question

Upon trying to upgrade from 10.10 to 11.04 all seemed to go well until the restart. This error message is what comes up:

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

How do we fix that?

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

Start with a livecd, open a a terminal

sudo fdisk -l
sudo mount /dev/sdax /mnt
sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts
sudo mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys
sudo chroot /mnt 

and now you can make update-initramfs and update-grub without errors

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

And reboot your system

Answer 3

I know that this is an old question, but I stumbled on it while googling this message.

In my situation the problem was that /boot was at 100% capacity, so the last 2 kernel updates had not completed successfully, hence on reboot when GRUB2 selected the lastest Kernel it failed.

I resolved by booting into the oldest kernel installed, and removing some unused kernels using aptitude. By using aptitude, after the uninstall had happened, dpkg automatically tried to configure the broken packages, and this time succeeded.

Hopefully this may be of help to future random googlers!

Answer 4

In addition to Tomeu's instructions, before chroot I needed to:

sudo mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev

Additionally, after the chroot:

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

(Got this from here.)

Answer 5

You can also boot the server in rescue mode, and reinstall only the grub

http://info.w3calculator.com/free-code/linux/recover-from-corrupted-boot-image/