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I have a fresh install of Ubuntu 17.10 (erase the entire disk and let the Ubuntu installer does whatever is needed).

It looks something similar to those two questions:

Basically when I start pressing the shift key in order to have access to the grub menu and use the recovery mode, I end up with:

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

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3 Answers 3

Reset to default
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According to the screenshot, the reason of dropping to initramfs is that root partition was not found. There could be two reasons for that:

  1. UUID is not correct in GRUB's kernel menu for root parameter
  2. LVM has not been loaded by initrd and since your root partition is on an LVM volume it was not able to find it

To verify if it's #1 or #2, run the following commands in initramfs console:

vgchange -ay
blkid | grep <uuid that you see on screen>

If the UUID is found then it's #2 (LVM was not loaded by initrd), and you should follow this link: Can't find LVM root dropped back to initramfs

If UUID was not found, you will simply need to provide the correct UUID in root parameters of your GRUB menu.

To figure out what the right UUID is run blkid to see what is assigned to the root partition. There is usually a 'root' word in the partition mount point, e.g. on my machine blkid would show something like this:

/dev/mapper/ubuntu--server-root: UUID="9daacbc2-160c-..." TYPE="ext4"
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2

I had same problem on Ubuntu 16.04, 4.4.0-116 kernel. I solved problem by installing appropriate linux-image-extra package.

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2
  • How can you install anything if the system drops to initramfs?
    – Oleg Gryb
    Dec 9, 2018 at 23:41
  • In my case there was another older kernels on the machine, 4.4.0-109 or 4.4.0-112, something like that. So I booted using one of those and installed package mentioned above. In general case there are ways to install packages using LiveCD, but i'm not sure it will work in this case.
    – Dmitry Aldoshkin
    Dec 11, 2018 at 3:46
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This can also happen when the UUID is lowercase on the device, and uppercase in the script, or vice-versa.

0123456789ABCDEF != 0123456789abcdef

(happened with LMDE and Grub2Win)

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