Sunday, October 4, 2009

Fix VFS Invalid Compression Format

Today my laptop lookup while it was updating, and I had to hard reset it.  However, the system won't boot up properly, and instead, it gave me the Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block error.  I have tried a number of suggestions found in Google, but didn't have much luck.  Eventually, I managed to restore my system by the following.

  1. Boot up the system using a LiveCD.  (I was using the Ubuntu 9.04 Desktop live CD)
  2. Open a command prompt, and sudo -s to become a super user
  3. Mount your boot partition, i.e. mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/
  4. Use chroot to become the root user of the newly mounted partition, i.e. chroot /mnt/
  5. Use aptitude search linux to find out the available images package on the repository
  6. Reinstall the image, i.e. aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic
  7. After it all done, get your fingers crossed, and reboot the system

With some luck, you may be able to get a working system back like myself.

To be on the safe side, I have rerun the aptitude reinstall linux-image-2.6.28-15-generic command again after I booted back to Gnome.


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