Initramfs booting failure

Question

After a hard reboot of my Ubuntu 20.04 system, I got this boot issue.

What I've tried fruitlessly so far:

1. Repair the boot with boot-repair from a Live CD.
2. Rebuild my ramdisk with sudo update-initramfs -c -k $(uname -r).

The both solutions seem to be typical troubleshooting methods in case of initramfs booting issues, but they didn't work for me. Could anybody suggest something else?

Answer 1

Let's check and repair your file system...

At the boot error message...

Hit the ENTER key to enter maintenance mode.

If you reach an initramfs prompt, type:

fsck -f /dev/sda2

If you reach a # prompt, type:

sudo fsck -f /dev/sda2

Then type:

reboot

Update #1:

• boot to a Ubuntu Live DVD/USB in “Try Ubuntu” mode
• open a terminal window by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T
• type sudo fdisk -l
• identify the /dev/sdXX device name for your "Linux Filesystem"
• type sudo fsck -f /dev/sda2, replacing sdXX with the number you found earlier
• repeat the fsck command if there were errors
• type reboot

Answer 2

Go to maintenance mode by pressing Enter.

Then type

journalctl -xb | grep "RUN fsck MANUALLY"

You'll will probably see a message like this

Oct 02 20:55:59 NAME systemd-fsck (839) : /dev/sdaX: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY: RUN fsck MANUALLY.

where X in /dev/sdaX is a number. Then enter this command.

fsck -y /dev/sdaX

replace X with whatever number you saw earlier on your screen. That should probably fix it.

If you see an error like, /dev/sdaX is mounted then reboot and open root shell from Advanced boot options. Unmount the filesystem using sudo umount /dev/sdaX and again try,

fsck -y /dev/sdaX