Kim Jensen

Software Engineer

Recover

ALERT! /dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root does not exists.

I have a nice little AMD based laptop with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, from Tuxedo Computers. Light, long battery - loads of CPU power, wonderful for developing cool things like my little Hobby Project.

However, in March 2022 - I noticed that they started providing Kernel updates. Without thinking more of it, I added the updates, but there was a problem with the signatures, so I couldn't boot using these. And as they stole the primary slot in the GRUP boot menu - I wished to get rid of them. BIG mistake. By removing them, more things were removed. So by next reboot, suddenly nothing worked. By trying to recover, I ran into the alert message that my vgubuntu-root file was missing... As I had just tried to get rid of some older discs, I had added all the data to my laptop - and was waiting for a new backup disc. Of course, this is the perfect time to have this problem.

Google was not as helpful as I had hoped. In the end, most were simply saying - reinstall! Not an option. Unlock, mount & chroot into my root partition, sounded like the correct way. But most things simply didn't work for me. In the end, I found two useful comments:

With the help of these, I could write a little script, that helped me with entering a working CHRoot environment, using a Live Ubuntu USB stick. Script is available here.