A few days ago, I hit Control-C in the middle of a pacman -Syu by mistake. And of course, as luck would have it, it was during the kernel build step. I reran the command and thought nothing of it.

Until yesterday; when I rebooted my system, I decrypted grub and ran into this error Error loading \vmlinuz-linux: not found

My setup follows the ArchWiki’s LUKS on LVM entry to create an encrypted bootloader (grub), root and swap disks. The error showed up after decrypting grub, and was resolved with a live USB running chroot.

This involved 

  • decrypting the boot and LVM partitions 
    cryptsetup open /dev/sdaX cryptmapper
  • mounting them and the efi partition, 
    mount /dev/MyVolGroup/root /mnt
  • accessing chroot,
  • reinstalling the kernel with a pacman -S linux

And voila, I had my system restored to its previous splendor. It was also good to know that the full disk encryption didn’t lock me out (although I did have a few seconds of panic).

For my future self to remember how the mount points work -

NAME                  MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda                     8:0    0 223.6G  0 disk  
├─sda1                  8:1    0   550M  0 part  /boot/efi
├─sda2                  8:2    0   200M  0 part  
│ └─encryptedBOOT     254:4    0   198M  0 crypt /boot
└─sda3                  8:3    0 222.9G  0 part  
  └─cryptoluks        254:0    0 222.9G  0 crypt 
    ├─MyVolGroup-root 254:1    0    40G  0 lvm   /
    ├─MyVolGroup-swap 254:2    0     8G  0 lvm   [SWAP]
    └─MyVolGroup-home 254:3    0 174.9G  0 lvm   /home