Kernel Panic after broken update: Cannot open root device

Upon the last update, I noticed there was an error and before I could look into it the machine lost power. Since then I’ve been fighting a boot issue with the kernel not found.

Long story short, with a LUKS partition I had to manually unlock and mount, I followed the Grub Restore Guide to reinstall the kernel612 and kernel headers packages.

Rebooted, and now facing a KERNEL PANIC BLUE SCREEN ?! lol, throwback to Windows98 days, honestly. Just a different font!

The error seems to be: “Cannot open root device.”

  1. The IDs after the guide 100% match the grub.cfg. I’ve done this 3 times now, and confirmed all UUIDs are correct for LUKS unlocking and for the root partition ID passed into the kernel, as well as the unlocked UUID of the ext4 for the PARTUUID.
  2. Oddly, the blue Kernel Panic screen actually shows available UUIDs, that do not exist on my system (lsblk, blkid, parted all show the original UUIDs that match grub.cfg).

I do not know where the kernel panic is getting it’s IDs from. The installer USB is not connected.

Kind of at a loss here.

“install-grub” in the Guide throws an error that an EFI partition is not found. However, I followed the guide and mounted it on /mnt/boot/efi as specified.

Note: we have a DKMS for ThrustMaster steering wheel, that has caused issues before.