Boot from initramfs shell

2014-01-24 - How to finish booting from an initramfs shell
Tag: Debian

The problem

Sometimes, your linux machine can get stuck while booting and drop you into an initramfs shell.

The solution

All initramfs are potentially different, but almost always feature busybox and common mechanisms. Recently I had to finish booting from an initramfs shell, here is how I used switch_root to do so :

lvm vgscan
lvm vgchange -ay vg
mount -t ext4 /dev/mapper/vg-root /root
exec switch_root -c /dev/console /root /sbin/init