Grub can't find kernel and I can't manage to show it to it: error: file /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64 not found

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#1

Hi everyone.
Tried to help a colleague and messed things up, now I need your help. Many thanks in advance, Monday he has to get back to work (crying desperately)…

Context:
Was unable to run pamac as it pointed to an already instance, however there was no lock file in var which I could delete. I tried to get to the bottom of it but gave up and, maybe gravely so, did not check if something bad was happening - I just rebooted the system. Then the odissey began:

Problem:
Grub loads and gives the following error:

error: file /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64 not found
error: you need to load the kernel first.

System won’t load, including via fallback.

Things I tried:

  • Run a live system - ok (/ is on gpt encrypted partition and boot on separate partition, so I did: cryptsetup open /dev/xxx2 root, then mount /dev/mapper/root /mnt/root + mount /dev/xxx1 /mnt/root/boot)
  • Get into inner system via manjaro-chroot /mnt/root - ok (reference: forum post here, cant post links)
  • pacman -Syyu - ok (updated some packages, system was fairly up to date, then “nothing to do”)
  • update grub - ok (reference: above)
  • mkinitcpio -P - ok (reference: forum post here, cant post links)
  • check if /boot/vmlinuz-5.10-x86_64 actually exists in the inner system, as grub claims it doesn’t, well it exists, alongside with everything else (I’d at least expect to find in /boot)

Next steps:
Well I’m not sure, googled a lot but wanted to get some direction to where to look next? Maybe something regarding UUIDs of partitions got messed up in grubs config? Maybe /boot partition is too full (but wouldn’t I run into problems when running pacman or update grub?

Again, thank you guys for your time and any tips on how to proceed with hunting down that error.

Have a great weekend!

#2

If you have another kernel installed, a good pratice is to have two, see if you can boot into it. If not boot an install media, chroot, and install another kernel, 5.15 is a lts kernel and good as a second one. That way you can boot into the system and work from there to fix the 5.10 issue.

2 Likes
#3

check theses points on chroot

mhwd-kernel -li 
ls /etc/mkinitcpio.d/*.preset
ls /boot/
ls /lib/modules/

inxi -Fza
1 Like
#4

Hi and welcome to the forum :+1:

Maybe grub needs tobe re-installed in the $ESP? (UEFI version) :thinking:

Try creating the initrd before you update grub, because grub can’t include something that is being generated later :wink:
Also helpful if you post the output of lsblk --fs while inside the chroot.

1 Like
#5

Guys, thanks for all the help!
All points are valid for anyone in a similar situation, in my case I resolved the problem on Sunday:
The kernel itself was corrupted, but mhwd-kernel apparently doesn’t work in chroot to (re-)install a kernel (in some post this was explained by the fact that it can’t install other kernels if you are running a kernel different from any of the ones mhwd-kernel -li lists, which makes sense to me at least, as outer-system-kernel != inner-system-kernel).

So I went the pacman route to have a second and working kernel: pacman -S --overwrite "*" linux515 linux515-headers linux515-nvidia
as in forum manjaro org/t/cannot-install-kernel/103154

All other steps were necessary to hunt down the problem, thanks everyone!

#6

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