VMWare ESX 4.1 update oddities

initrd /initrd.img

Error 15:File not Found

Press any key to continue …

See this? Want to scream? It’s okay, I might have a solution for you:

1. Boot into Troubleshooting mode.
2. cd /boot
3. ls -al (see if there’s an initrd.img link that is broken, it will show up red)
4. rm initrd-2.4.xx-xxx.esx.img (remove the oldest initrd .img file if there is more than one)
4. ln -s initrd-2.4.xx-xxx.esx.img initrd.img (Replace x’s with the newest version that is actually there, which will re-link the broken link to another img, if one is available. You will if you are seeing this for the same reason I saw it.)
5. reboot

Ignore all the kernal mismatch errors you will probably see, and wait about 5-10 minutes. Then:

6. cd /boot
7. ls -al (see if the missing initrd .img version from step 3 is actually there now. It will be a newer version than the one you linked in step 4.)
8. ln -s initrd-2.4.xx-xxx.esx.img initrd.img (link to the newer one you now should see, since vmware now has had the chance to finish its update script.)
9. reboot

That should do it. What probably happened was your update script tried to copy a new version of the initrd image into /boot, but since you followed vmware best practices and there is obviously a bug in their update software causing old versions to not be removed, the /boot partition was full. The script should try to recover once you boot up with that old initrd, though.

Hope that helps any.