Introduction
I tried to upgrade my Ubuntu Server but it didn’t boot up after rebooting. I jumped on via the console and saw the following:
kernel panic-not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown block(0,0)
I panicked and immediately feared the worse but turns out it is easy peasy to sort out.
Fix
The fix was pretty easy, I rebooted the box and used the advanced menu to look for an older kernel that I could boot into. There was so I tried the next available and it worked. I then used the following command to see what the status of the /boot partition:
df
The answer was obvious:
Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1 240972 240972 0 100% /boot
No space left! It was a simple case of running the following command:
sudo apt-get autoremove
The definition of which is “autoremove – Remove automatically all unused packages”
This then freed up lots of space and I was able to upgrade again.
/dev/sda1 240972 39506 189025 18% /boot
If you want to view what linux images are installed, use the following:
dpkg –get-selections | grep linux-image-
You’ll get a similar result like below:
linux-image-3.13.0-32-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-44-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-46-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-48-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-49-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-51-generic deinstall
linux-image-3.13.0-52-generic install
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-32-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-44-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-46-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-48-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-49-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-51-generic deinstall
linux-image-extra-3.13.0-52-generic install
Job done.
