Kubuntu 18.04 will not boot after installing tiny-initramfs
 

Hi,

Hope someone can help me and apologies in advance of me not being a Linux guru or using this forum correctly, my first time. :D

I've been using Kubuntu since about Kubuntu 14 and always update to LTS versions. I usually can work things out for myself but this one has got me. I was on kernel 4.15-23 and did the upgrade to kernel 4.15-30 and 4.15-32/33 and 34 when the updates were available. However when booting they would never load any other kernel version only 4.15-23 would load. One day when I was bored looking through synaptic I saw tiny-initramfs as a right click option on the kernel entry, so without thinking I installed it. I didn't realise it replaced initramfs and when I booted it wouldn't boot/load anything.

That was 4 weeks ago and I've spent about 100 hours + on this and it is now making me frustrated. I've tried many different things, following different guides but re-booting either hangs or drops to INITRAMFS prompt. I've tried setting root and kernel by dropping to command prompt at GRUB. I've booted many times from a live CD and chroot into my os, reloading initramfs and removing tiny-initramfs via synaptic. I've tried installing LiLo as an alternate to see if that would reconfigure necessary files. I've installed boot-repair from the live cd and reinstalled grub and kernels but to no avail. I've tried editing fstab and cryptab files directly but it makes no difference.

I ran update initrmfs -uv and checking through the rows appears to fail at invalid line in crypttab file. I changed the line in crypttab, ran it again but still did not make any difference. The main problem appears to be it never loads the screen to prompt me for the decryption password.

I realise that a re-install would be the easiest but I have a system which I've built up over several years with all kinds of privacy/security/password managers/IDS/malware/virus checkers and really don't want to have to re-do all that if I can salvage the os and don't want to lose all my passwords.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Try this:

Open a chroot shell to your '/'. Mount /boot and /usr if necessary. run 'bash' to get a better shell.

Remove tiny-initramfs with apt-get.

Remove lilo.

Delete existing initrd files in /boot using 'update-initramfs -d <version>'.


Reinstall grub with grubinstall.

Check if your initrd files are back in /boot.

It should work after that.

dude you blew your intrid and maybe boot sector and pointed it to something drop a kubuntu live in there and sudo grub-install sdX x=your device
kubuntu uses uuid should be ok.

Thanks guys, I'll give this a try tonight when I get home and let you know.