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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4

Don’t you have a previous kernel you can boot into, then try the upgrade again? Normally at least 3 kernels are kept & those should be available via the GRUB boot menu.

5

I did have a previous kernel, but it would not boot either. As mentioned in my own anser to the problem, My boot partition was small, and it was ext4. So, fragmentation seemed to be an issue. I enlarged the boot partition and used e4defrag to defrag it. That seemed to work.