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