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warl0ck

Member

Registered: 2020-04-29

Posts: 50

[SOLVED] Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs

So I have been trying all day to debug issues related to ALSA and pulseaudio.

While doing this, I attempted to downgrade the kernel. Well somehow, through the process of downgrading and re-upgrading, I broke something.

Initially I was getting errors about "Unexpected end of file in vmlinuz", so I chrooted into my install from a Mint USB, and reinstalled the kernel and headers, and regenerated my grub config.

Now when I try to boot, I hang at "Loading initial ramdisk".

I turned off the "quiet" grub param, and now booting gives me:

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

I have no idea where to go from here.

Last edited by warl0ck (2020-05-07 01:14:25)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,232

Re: [SOLVED] Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs

That means your grub config was incorrectly regenerated (and you wouldn't have needed to do that anyway). Mount the partitions in the chroot as you expect them to be and post

lsblk -f
tree /boot #Needs the tree package

and the command you've used to generate and the contents of the grub config.

warl0ck

Member

Registered: 2020-04-29

Posts: 50

Re: [SOLVED] Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs

I had to chroot into the system, and I found that the "linux.preset" in mkinitcpio.d was empty.

I deleted it and reran

 mkinitcpio -P

and I was able to boot again.