Score:0

Error: vgubuntu-root does not exist. Dropping to a shell

us flag

I installed Ubuntu 21.04 with disk encryption a week ago.

Now it wouldn't boot and gives this error:

ALERT! /dev/mapper/vgubuntu-root does not exist. Dropping to a shell!

How to fix it?

Screenshot

Score:0
us flag

I found a way to get into the laptop. Here's what I did:

On the initramfs screen I typed (replace nvme0n1p3 with your Luks partition):

cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/nvme0n1p3 tmpData

Cryptsetup then asked my passphrase which I typed.

After that I simply exited initramfs:

exit

And ta-da! It booted normally.

When I reboot the laptop the error persists though so I still have to figure out how to fix that. I will probably have to mess with some or all of these files:

/etc/fstab
/etc/crypttab
/boot/grub/grub.conf

If anyone knows what to do please share!

Score:0
pf flag

I had a similar problem (see 22.04 (LVM, encrypted) stopped booting, drop to shell: Error: vgubuntu-root does not exist) which turned out to be a mismatch between the physical location of the encrypted partition and how it's labeled in /etc/crypttab. Editing the file to correct that solved the boot problem:

Partition is sda3, but /etc/crypttab entry was for sda6_crypt; edited to sda3_crypt and regenerate initramfs:

sudo update-initramfs -u
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