1
    [    1.207957] kernel: Trying to unpack rootfs image as initramfs...
[    1.356624] kernel: Initramfs unpacking failed: Decoding failed

I just saw this error message when I switched on my computer today. Thankfully it didn't cause a crash and I was able to login without problem. To give you some background, my computer was not booting at all few days ago with lots of error regarding ata bus and before that I used to have Windows 10 which was also not booting. I thought my hard drive was dying but came across to some suggestions to check sata cables and power plugs. So, I opened up my laptop, disconnect and reconnect sata cables and power plugs and it worked. I was able to boot without problems for 3 days but today I got this error message. When I listen to my hard drive closely, I hear it is working a bit then makes a ticking sound periodically. I think it is dying but fsck doesn't report any bad sector. I have no important data on this harddrive but don't want to change it as I can still use my pc.

Andrew Harlan
  • 311

1 Answers1

1

This is the same issue I solved here

In a nutshell :

Here are the steps :

  • With the selector on your main GRUB entry press e to enter the editor
  • Find the entry that starts with linux
  • Delete quiet splash (or anything you have at the end of the line, but not touching any word that starts with a $) from the line (don't worry the change is only going to last one boot) replacing it with nomodeset (the line should look like this
linux   /boot/vmlinuz-5.9.12-050912-generic root=UUID=<REDACTED> ro nomodeset $vt_handoff
  • Boot using F10 and wait to be spawned to the DE (if you don't no worry, stike Ctrl-Alt-F2 to enter the tty)
  • Once logged and within an open terminal run :
sudo -i
nano /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf

Change the COMPRESS line from COMPRESS=lz4 to COMPRESS=gzip

Save the changes with Ctrl + x | y | Return

then run update-initramfs -u

Reboot and done

Nicolas Formichella
  • 612
  • 4
  • 15