Monday, April 08, 2019

Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs.

I was getting an error while running Ubuntu 18.04 in Virtualbox 6.0.  The error "Kernel Panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs...".  The error occurred after a failed system update. 



To fix this I had to pick ADVANCED in the GRUB menu on startup of the virtual and pick a previous working kernel version to boot with.  This booted me with an older version of the kernel but it was functioning. 


I then started a TERMINAL and typed the following two commands:

sudo update-initramfs -u -k VERSION* 

sudo update-grub 

Replace VERSION* with the name of the version giving you the panic error, in my case it was 4.15.0-47-generic.  So my command was: sudo update-initramfs -u -k 4.15.0-47-generic

That's it, you should be able to restart the system and it will boot normally.   If it doesn't here's a link to an article that may provide more help on this topic. LINK HERE And here is a link to the GRUB2 manual.  GRUB2 Manual



NOTE: the 2nd picture is of an older version of GRUB and is only there to give you an idea of what you'll see.  It is not a capture of my screen (I forgot) so this is just a googled image used as an example to aid you.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It works. Thank you

Anonymous said...

it works fine for me
i got this error after upgrading the version of VirtualBox and installing new version of VBoxGuestAdditions
thnks

Anonymous said...

Worked for me too, cheers lad