Arch linux vmlinuz linux

Fixing an Arch Linux system missing vmlinuz

I run into my fair share of “gotchas” as an Arch Linux user. I also stand firmly that I’ve always ran into my fair share of “gotchas” running Linux in general.

In fact, I’ve even run into my fair share of “gotchas” on both macOS and Windows systems, so maybe the problem is just me.

Joking aside, I’m a power user. I run into issues. I fix those issues. Then I document those issues, first and foremost, for myself, so I know how to fix them in the future. Secondarily, I document things because I found they weren’t properly documented and to help other weary travelers experiencing the same thing.

My latest “gotcha” came in the form of running a well deserved Arch Linux upgrade recently. With well over 300 packages to be installed, what could possibly go wrong?

I went through my usual dance of saving all of my files and terminating screen sessions and closing out every application sans my beloved terminal. I ran yay with the usual flags and made the mistake of walking away for a few minutes to do something else.

I came back a few minutes later to my system shutting down, I assumed to reboot. Generally speaking, this isn’t normal. While I do reboot after I run an upgrade, Arch Linux doesn’t do this automatically that I ever remember.

“Maybe I remembered wrong”, I thought.

Upon restarting, I was greeted with the unexpected (actual error message may vary as I forgot to snap a photo for posterity):

Missing vmlinuz from /boot 

I was getting ready to sit down to finish the main story of Super Mario Odyssey to boot.

Side note, if you own a Switch and don’t own Super Mario Odyssey, AND want to help support my site because I just helped you out of a jam, you definitely should pick up a copy.

Sorry about that, gotta pay the bills and all 😉

So as mentioned, this was completely unexpected but not too shocking considering I had just ran an upgrade and witnessed some strange reboot behavior.

I never did get to the bottom of what actually went wrong. I’ve even updated my System76 Galago Pro recently as well, with well over 1,000 new packages, and didn’t run into the same issue.

Because this was my daily driver and it was Sunday afternoon, I had to get this resolved resolved quickly as to not impact my upcoming work day.

The error message I received was indicative of the Linux kernel going missing, so my first thought was to reboot into the LTS Linux Kernel. I always keep the LTS release of the Linux Kernel installed just in case I experience some issue with the mainline Kernel. At least once in my life the issue was the mainline Kernel’s fault and running LTS for a bit to wait for a fix was the solution.

So I rebooted and selected the LTS Linux Kernel with extremely high hopes that I’d be back to a working system.

No dice, same deal with the LTS version. Whatever went wrong borked both the linux and linux-lts packages I had installed.

Not a big deal, just like keeping multiple versions of the Linux Kernel installed, I also keep a thumb drive handy with Arch Linux on it in case I need to boot to a live disk to resolve my issue.

So that’s what I did. I booted up my trusty thumb drive, went through the steps to get wireless networking up and running, mounted my partitions, chroot ed the Arch way, and reinstalled the now missing packages.

It went something like this:

1. Boot to my trusty Arch Linux USB thumb drive.
2. Connected to my wireless network by running wifi-menu and following the prompts.
3. Mounted my root / partition as such with mount /dev/DEVICE /mnt and immediately checked if I had lost any files (nothing obvious was gone).
4. Mounted my boot /boot partition as well: mount /dev/DEVICE /mnt/boot .
5. Changed root directories to the mounted devices: arch-chroot /mnt .
6. Installed the missing packages: pacman -S linux linux-lts .
7. Rebooted to a working Arch Linux system!

Depending on your Linux distribution of choice, you could probably follow the same steps with a Live Disk for the distro and swap the Arch Linux specific commands for said distribution.

Sadly, this didn’t get me 100% back in business.

Upon rebooting, I was faced with messaging about fsck running into some errors and needing to be ran manually. I was able to do so from the prompt I was presented with.

While still not 100% sure of the cause, it does appear that it was perhaps related to either some underly issues with my SSD or some wires getting crossed with some bits being written to the same place and the system getting extremely confused about it.

Fortunately after running fsck and letting it do what it does, I was in fact able to boot to a working Linux desktop again.

Being a glutton for punishment, I went ahead ran another upgrade to make sure everything was up to date, as that was what I originally set out to do). A few reboots later, I was confident that the issues had been squashed.

Off to play Super Mario Odyssey I went.

Fast forward to the next day when I hopped on my daily stand up video call for work. Everything was aces, except my camera didn’t show up, so I had to actually “phone it in” without any video for the call.

Getting this crap resolved was my “blocker” for the day, obviously.

After jumping off the call, I immediately opened up cheese to see which devices were shown. Since I dock to my monitor and have an external camera, I should have 2 separate devices. My thought was perhaps my external camera was missing, but my laptop’s camera was still showing up.

Nope, both gone. Time to reboot to the LTS Kernel to see if it’s a mainline Kernel issue. Booted into the LTS Kernel, everything was as it should be. Both camera devices were showing up and working as expected.

After rebooting back into the mainline Kernel, I looked around the system logs and lsmod and all of that, none of which indicated that any of my camera devices were being picked up at all.

My last ditch effort before deciding that I should just run with the LTS Kernel for a bit was to forcefully reinstall the linux package again, in case that installing it from the live disk was part of the problem.

Sure enough, after reinstalling the linux package and rebooting again, everything was back to normal. Even though this sounds like a mountain of a problem, I spent MAYBE an hour all in on it and I got this article out of it to boot 🙂

Oh, for anybody that’s been following the subplot, I did in fact beat the main story of Super Mario Odyssey!

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Arch Linux

I tried following the instructions in the installation guide. I’m using systemd-boot on this Asus r209ha laptop.

However, when I try to boot into my installation, I get this:

Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

My first thought was that it was odd that there’s a \ instead of a / there, so I chrooted into my new system again and checked /boot/loader/entries/arch.conf. It is:

title Arch Linux
linux /vmlinuz-linux
initrd /intel-ucode.img
initrd /initramfs-linux.img
options root=PARTUUID=410b225d-ea4b-4d72-9d8e-2c9db5a273dd rw

Last edited by ThomasN (2016-09-14 17:22:45)

#2 2016-09-14 15:20:32

ewaller Administrator From: Pasadena, CA Registered: 2009-07-13 Posts: 19,356

Re: [SOLVED] Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

From the install media, mount your boot partition on /mnt and verify that vmlinuz-linux exists in the mount point. ( ls -l /mnt )

When you chrooted into the system, are you sure that the boot partition was mounted on /boot ?

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature — Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. — Alan Turing
—
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

#3 2016-09-14 15:33:53

Re: [SOLVED] Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

When mounting my boot partition on /mnt from the install media, ‘ls -l /mnt’ shows only the directories ‘EFI’ and ‘loader’ and the file ‘intel-ucode.img’.

When I chrooted, I mounted the boot partition on /boot using ‘mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot’.

mmcblk0p1 is the EFI-partition I created earlier in the installation process.

#4 2016-09-14 15:37:45

Re: [SOLVED] Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

When mounting my boot partition on /mnt from the install media, ‘ls -l /mnt’ shows only the directories ‘EFI’ and ‘loader’ and the file ‘intel-ucode.img’.

When I chrooted, I mounted the boot partition on /boot using ‘mount /dev/mmcblk0p1 /boot’.

mmcblk0p1 is the EFI-partition I created earlier in the installation process.

If you mounted your root partition to /mnt, then you should’ve mounted the boot partition to /mnt/boot, not /boot. What you should do is boot the live USB, mount your root partition to /mnt and your boot partition to /mnt/boot, chroot in and then:

And then make sure that vmlinuz-linux is present.

Transhumanist, amateur programmer and Linux enthusiast.

#5 2016-09-14 15:40:33

ewaller Administrator From: Pasadena, CA Registered: 2009-07-13 Posts: 19,356

Re: [SOLVED] Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

Well, that is the problem. The next question is, why is vmlinuz-linux missing? if you unmount the boot partition, then mount the root partition on /mnt, look in /mnt/boot. It should be empty.
I’m guessing you will find the missing kernel there. If so, you can mount the boot partition somewhere (not /mnt/boot) and move the files.

Alternately, reestablish the chroot environment with the root partition on /mnt and the boot partition on /mnt/boot, and install the linux package.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature — Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. — Alan Turing
—
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

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