Problem booting after update: initramfs unpacking failed: uncompression error

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

Last week I did a dnf upgrade on my RL 8 system. Rebooting fails with a message that says Initramfs unpacking failed: uncompression error. Below is a screen campture of the message.
image

I am unable to boot using the rescue image (same error). I am able to boot using SystemRescue and boot into linux. I tried reinstalling grub (using dnf reinstall). I am using EFI Boot and so also reinstalled the shim. The root volume is encrypted and in the past the boot process prompted for the encryption passphrase. When I boot using SystemRescue, it asks for the passphrase and is able to mount everything and boot. I reran dracut to rebuild the initramfs, but it seems the same as the one created by dnf. I tried booting the previous kernel, and it did not work either, though I noticed that the initramfs image is different than the one before the update (which I have backed up).

Are there any suggestions on what the problem is or how to debug it?

Thanks in advance.

2

I should add that I am able to list the initramfs image with lsinitrd.

3

I found a suggestion that the initramfs image is fragmented and to use e4defrag to defrag it. I was able to do this by booting using SystemRescue. My boot partition was small, so I expanded it and then this was successful.

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