ubuntu 10.0.4 gives kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0) while booting

Question

Hi i recently installed ubuntu 8.04 on my desktop and in the upgrades menu i gave upgrade to ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS but after installing it started giving me this error

[    0.694063] Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)

Please help as i am new to ubuntu and also get back to me for additional info if required.

Answer 1

I will give you one option I know would work, but it involves booting from a full install CD / ISO and using rescue mode to gain access to your boot volume and Grub. Here is what you would do to start.

• Boot from a full install CD and choose the menu option for rescue mode.
• go to your boot volume where Grub is located, usually in rescue mode your old file system is on /mnt/sysimage
• Find and edit /mnt/sysimage/boot/grub.conf to increase the timeout and unhide the menu using the following commands within grub.conf.

Grub.conf

  timeout=20    
  #hiddenmenu

Reboot from the hdd this time and when grub shows up choose the previous working kernel and that should boot. You will be back on a previous kernel and possibly release, but you will have a system to at least back up and retry the upgrade.

Answer 2

I was getting this when attempting to install 13.10 and it turned out to be incorrect usb formatting in my case. my usb stick was formatted to NTFS and I would get this error every time I tried to boot from it. Once I formatted the usb stick to fat32 the installation worked like a charm.

Hope it helps!

Answer 3

The same problem happened to me and here is the easiest way to solve this problem so as to get a bootable system. The first thing you need to do is, try to boot in a recovery mode as explained here. Once you get the root prompt, execute the following commands.

$ sudo update-initramfs -u  
$ sudo update-grub2 
$ sudo reboot 

Hope this helps.

Answer 4

Very old question, but I'm going to leave my answer here as it showed up the highest in Google when searching for solution.

While upgrading from 19.04 to 19.10, the screen blacked out and the system went to full halt. Afterwards the booting failed for each available Kernel version I had.

In my case, the solution was to let Ubuntu download missing files due to failed upgrade. To do so, try to boot in recovery mode and select Repair broken packages option if available. This might take a while, but afterwards all started working.