Arch Linux

Franek

Member

Registered: 2010-05-16

Posts: 100

[solved] Kernel panic: "Initramfs unpacking failed: read error"

Since the last system update, booting my desktop computer fails at an early stage:

Decompressing Linux... Parsing ELF... done.
Booting the kernel.
[    0.365488] Initramfs unpacking failed: read error
[    0.932466] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)
[    0.932521] Pid: 1, comm: swapper Not tainted 3.0-ARCH #1
[    0.932566] Call Trace:

(A few lines following after that. The above is typed by hand, might contain typos.)

This happens for both kernels I have installed (linux and linux-ck (the latter not in the official repos)). It keeps happening after downgrading to an older kernel from within a live CD chroot environment. Downgrading mkinitcpio and reinstalling the kernel also does not help.

Correction: The error is not present for the latest standard kernel, it it is installed with mkinitcpio-0.7.5-1 . For now I am adding mkinitcpio to IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf .

I am lost. What could be wrong?

I will be happy to provide more information/output, if required.

EDIT: After an update two days ago, it happened again ("read error" with a different detailed message, which is, however, of no significance, as:) and this second time reinstalling kernels from a live CD/chroot environment, I noticed that this would sometimes fail because of "no space left on device". My boot partition is only 32MiB big, which apparently is not enough for two kernels (linux and linux-ck) along with their fallbacks. I uninstalled one of them and know booting the other one works just fine.

Last edited by Franek (2012-01-08 18:30:42)