Hi all, new to getting Linux support so forgive me if I am missing details.
My Rocky Linux install updated over night along with a reboot and I found it not responsive this morning. The VPS panel showed the CPU at 100% usage. It didn’t despond to anything but a power cycle.
On booting I noticed this error:
kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block
If I rebooted and selected the slightly older kernel it boots without issue. The currently running kernel is:
5.14.0-503.19.1.el9_5.x86_64
Happy to provide whatever details are needed, I just don’t know what they might be.
It could be a number of things like the initrd image is missing or malformed for the new kernel or the boot entry in /boot/loader/entries/<macineID>-<kernel-version> is deficient. You can generate a new initrd with dracut, see the man page, and with grubby you can check the boot entries.
In a terminal run this command:
sudo grubby --info=ALL
and compare each index for the lines “args=” and “root=” to see if the latest kernel is listed with the same parameters.
Let us know what you find. This has happened to me in the past. Is this a recent Rocky install?
If I power cycle and select the second option from the list it boots:
Yes this is a recent Rocky install, I did have an initial issue with some of my RAM missing. I did some troubleshooting and the kdump service was was not starting
kdump.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
I went down a rabbit hole of troubleshooting but could never resolve it. I got “around” it by just disabling the kdump service. I only mention it since you asked if it was a recent rocky install.
Sounds like the new kernel isn’t installed properly and the initramfs hasn’t been generated properly. You can try reinstalling the new kernel when booted using the older kernel. AS @jbkt23 already hinted at.