258

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?

5
  • 2
    Your troubles might having nothing to do with your main system, but rather with your install media (USB stick)... ➪ see here: askubuntu.com/a/632636/479118
    – Frank N
    Dec 4, 2015 at 18:00
  • 1
    I can't post an answer since I don't have enough rep, but when I got this problem I solved it by booting to a live USB stick, mounting the main and EFI partitions, enabling networking, and running sudo apt-get install linux-image-generic to upgrade to the latest kernel.
    – Owen
    Apr 23, 2019 at 4:04
  • 1
    This has way too many answers, but not what I needed: dpkg --configure linux-kernel-<version>-generic - not with -a because that triggered the recovery menu again. See my answer for more. Oct 30, 2020 at 1:13
  • 11
    It's now 11 years later, and 22.04 fails to automatically fix this problem and/or give decent clues of what steps to take !!
    – Rick James
    May 16, 2022 at 19:20
  • 1
    Boot to the Boot-Repair live CD and repair GRUB. Detailed instructions here. Dec 2, 2022 at 5:56

12 Answers 12

257

You are missing the initramfs for that kernel. Choose another kernel from the GRUB menu under Advanced options for Ubuntu and run sudo update-initramfs -u -k version to generate the initrd for version (replace version with the kernel version string such as 4.15.0-36-generic) then sudo update-grub.

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  • 12
    what if the kernel panic is being shown when selecting the unique kernel option that exists for that OS (in a multi-boot scenario), how does one go to launch update-initramfs?
    – knocte
    Jan 29, 2014 at 9:04
  • 6
    @knocte, See Tomeu Roig's answer.
    – psusi
    Jan 29, 2014 at 14:07
  • 4
    I cannot enter Ubuntu System or Recovery Mode, how can I execute that command to test whether it works?
    – Casper
    Jul 16, 2016 at 9:54
  • 2
    @sherrellbc, it does have to do with the rootfs. The kernel can't mount the rootfs because it isn't configured correctly to do so. Instead it is assumed that the kernel will use an initramfs to mount the rootfs. In the days before initramfs, you had to configure the kernel to know a hard coded block number for the rootfs to mount, and this is the behavior it falls back to when it has no initramfs.
    – psusi
    Feb 11, 2018 at 2:43
  • 2
    In my case, the cause was running out of storage space. So I chose a previous kernel, booted, deleted stuff from the hard drive, and rebooted back to the original kernel.
    – Ibu
    Jun 11, 2018 at 21:51
109

Start with a livecd, open a a terminal and execute:

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 

If you /boot is on a separate partition also call:

sudo mount /dev/sday /mnt/boot

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

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

If you don't know your version. Use:

dpkg --list | grep linux-image

And just update Grub.

update-grub

Reboot your system.

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  • 2
    I have added sudo mount --bind /dev/pts /mnt/dev/pts and sudo mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys in my edit; without this, update-grub2 complained.
    – Hbf
    Nov 8, 2012 at 15:51
  • 8
    how can I found out the exact version?
    – knocte
    Jan 29, 2014 at 9:05
  • 2
    None of the mount points exist beyond the first one /dev/sdax if you're using EFI. Jul 28, 2014 at 14:36
  • 1
    Very nice - this worked for me in eliminating the 'kernel panic' error. I still had to follow it up by selecting the 'repair' start-up option in grub and selecting 'fix broken packages'. That took care of my remaining issues.
    – Gatmando
    Mar 22, 2016 at 23:27
  • 1
    mount: mount point {path} does not exist. All the mount points does not exist. How can I solve the problem?
    – Casper
    Jul 16, 2016 at 10:07
72

In case this happened after an aborted kernel update (e.g. system crash while aptitude safe-upgrade),

  1. boot with an older kernel and
  2. run dpkg --configure -a.

This will complete the upgrade, including configuring the boot settings as psusi explains.

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  • 2
    When I upgraded from Ubuntu 20.04 to 22.04, I received the above error. Applying your solution fixed everything. Thanks!
    – user238607
    Mar 1, 2022 at 16:40
  • I was getting the following error ERROR (dkms apport): binary package for evdi: 1.12.0 not found, search results showed it is related to DisplayLink which I was not using anymore, so I uninstalled it, sudo displaylink-installer uninstall and redid the above and it worked.
    – Waqleh
    May 15, 2023 at 8:21
  • Wow, thanks. Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) sound really bad, I was ready to nuke the old server and install a new HDD. I just needed to remove some old kernels. Sep 8, 2023 at 9:34
  • this worked on 20.04
    – strix25
    Sep 23, 2023 at 15:46
30

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 latest Kernel, it failed.

I resolved the issue 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.

5
  • 5
    This was the closest to my solution; just running dpkg --configure -a was enough to trigger the update-initramfs hook, and fix the broken kernel.
    – Symmetric
    May 11, 2013 at 19:44
  • 1
    You mean you had a separate /boot partition is that it? Oct 1, 2015 at 7:00
  • 2
    It was a server set up prior to my arrival, and it was configured with /boot on it's own partition and unattended-upgrades Oct 1, 2015 at 14:24
  • 4
    You can use sudo apt-get autoremove to remove old kernels in case your running out of space on /boot. Jul 21, 2016 at 5:42
  • 2
    I booted into an older kernel, did a sudo apt-get autoremove, rebooted again (older kernel), then did a sudo apt-get dist-upgrade, and this worked. This was on a small test machine I have. Same issue though, 100% /boot
    – jmlumpkin
    May 23, 2018 at 2:51
10

Full diagnosis procedure based on kernel messages

But using this QEMU emulation setup I tried to produce minimal examples of every possible failure type to help you debug your problem.

In that simple setup, QEMU emulates a system with:

  • a single virtio disk which represents a hard disk or SDD of real hardware
  • that virtio disk has a raw unpartitioned ext4 image in it. In normal operation, that device would appear under /dev/vda (v is the indicator letter for virtio, if it were partitioned the partitions would be /dev/vda1, /dev/vda2, etc.)

The possible errors you could get are:

  1. Linux cannot read bytes from the disk.

    This could be either because the disk is broken, or because you didn't configure Linux with the ability to read from that hardware type.

    In my QEMU case I can reproduce this by removing the key options that allow the kernel to read that virtio disk:

    CONFIG_VIRTIO_BLK=y
    CONFIG_VIRTIO_PCI=y
    

    The resulting error message is looks like this

    <4>[    0.541708] VFS: Cannot open root device "vda" or unknown-block(0,0): error -6
    <4>[    0.542035] Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
    <0>[    0.542562] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
    

    So here Linux tells us that it can't read from vda at all at: VFS: Cannot open root device "vda" or unknown-block(0,0): error -6.

    Then, at Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions: it gives a list of partitions it could read.

    In our case, the list is empty however, since the next line is completely unrelated.

  2. Linux can read bytes from the disk, but it doesn't understand the filesystem to read files out of it.

    This is normally because you didn't configure the kernel to read that filesystem type.

    I can reach this case by removing the kernel's ability to read an ext4 filesystem:

    CONFIG_EXT4_FS=y
    

    With that removed, the error message is:

    <4>[    0.585296] List of all partitions:
    <4>[    0.585913] fe00          524288 vda
    <4>[    0.586123]  driver: virtio_blk
    <4>[    0.586471] No filesystem could mount root, tried:
    <4>[    0.586497]  squashfs
    <4>[    0.586724]
    <0>[    0.587360] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(254,0)
    

    So Linux tells us that it managed to find a vda partition by reading the disk with the virtio_blk device.

    But then, it was not able to read that partition. It tried squashfs, which is the only other filesystem we have enabled, but that didn't work, because we have an ext4 partition.

  3. You passed the wrong root= kernel command line option.

    This one is easy, just pass the correct one! The kernel even gives you a list of the ones it knows about!

    For example, if we pass a wrong:

    root=/dev/vda2
    

    which doesn't even exist, the kernel gives an error of type:

    <4>[    0.608475] Please append a correct "root=" boot option; here are the available partitions:
    <4>[    0.609563] fe00          524288 vda
    <4>[    0.609723]  driver: virtio_blk
    <0>[    0.610433] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(254,2)
    

    clearing telling us that "hey: there is no vda2, but there is a vda!"

    This example also clarifies well what the (0,0), (254,0) and (254,2) meant from previous cases:

    • (0,0): first number 0 means could not read from the disk at all
    • (254,2): 254 is some ID that got assigned to the disk. 2 is the partition withing that ID as in /dev/vda2. And partition 0 means a raw non-partitioned partition as in /dev/vda.

Tested on Linux 5.4.3.

3

I faced this problem, as linux headers were getting updated, and electricity was gone. I recovered as below,

Go to grub menu and select advanced options > select a previous kernel and boot,

Once you get terminal, run below command,

sudo dpkg --configure -a

here from man page of dpkg,

--configure package...|-a|--pending
              Configure a package which has been unpacked but not yet configured.  If -a or --pending is given instead of package, all unpacked but unconfigured packages are configured.

              To reconfigure a package which has already been configured, try the dpkg-reconfigure(8) command instead.

              Configuring consists of the following steps:

              1. Unpack the conffiles, and at the same time back up the old conffiles, so that they can be restored if something goes wrong.

              2. Run postinst script, if provided by the package.

logs as below,

Setting up linux-image-4.15.0-76-generic (4.15.0-76.86) ...
Processing triggers for initramfs-tools (0.130ubuntu3.9) ...
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-74-generic
Processing triggers for linux-image-4.15.0-76-generic (4.15.0-76.86) ...
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/dkms:
 * dkms: running auto installation service for kernel 4.15.0-76-generic
   ...done.
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/initramfs-tools:
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-76-generic
/etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub:
Sourcing file `/etc/default/grub'
Generating grub configuration file ...
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-76-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-76-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-74-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-74-generic
Found linux image: /boot/vmlinuz-4.15.0-72-generic
Found initrd image: /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-72-generic
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.elf
Found memtest86+ image: /boot/memtest86+.bin
Found Windows 7 on /dev/sda1
done

and voila, newer package that was downloaded but not configured is working.

1

In my case:

  • It was caused by a crash during upgrade to LTS 20.04.

  • dpkg --configure -a opened the recovery menu again, so the packages were not (re)configured.

  • So I had to list the installed kernels

    dpkg --list | grep linux-kernel | more
    
  • and configure specifically the kernel that was newly installed:

    dpkg --configure linux-kernel-5.20.0-52-generic
    

On a related note, the causes of the upgrade crash may be:

  • Installation ran out of space on the volume with kernels:

    dpkg --purge remove linux-kernel-<someOldVersion>
    

    I wouldn't go with "remove all old kernels" right away because you want some to boot to if the newest is broken.

  • Your disk is wearing off - run smartctl --health --all and e2fsck ...

  • Some driver caused the whole OS to hang - for me this happens with nVidia driver when playing 4K movie on 4K screen.

1

In my case, it was because my Dell XPS 15 9550 has some kind of weird problem of not being able to load the full initrd image in the RAM on the UEFI procedure. Answered on another question specific to that one also.

https://askubuntu.com/a/1412273/170833

0

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.)

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  • 1
    Tomeu already mentioned mounting /dev on /mnt/dev.
    – Lekensteyn
    Oct 16, 2011 at 8:59
0

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/

1
  • link was dead..
    – John Joe
    Apr 24, 2018 at 16:24
0

I got this problem due to my /boot partition was full so my kernel updates had failed. I managed to fix this by booting from an old kernel in the GRUB menu.

When managed to boot I began purging old kernels, but I had manage to get some dependency issues so first I had to uninstall linux-server package

apt-get remove linux-server
apt-get update
apt-get -f install
apt-get upgrade

Then I rebooted and everything was working fine!

0

Tested for Lubuntu 22.04 with LUKS encryption.
Easy way. No terminal commands, no editing files.

  1. reboot your computer, enter your LUKS encryption password, press Enter
  2. Select other boot options
  3. Select old kernel (recovery mode)
  4. Click "fix broken packages"
  5. Click "update grub"
  6. Reboot in normal mode

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