Missing Kernel; formerly a droplet running Ubuntu 12.04

February 15, 2018 2.2k views
DigitalOcean Ubuntu
dfcarpenter
By:
dfcarpenter

So I have a small droplet which I have been running for years. It's a LAMP stack on Ubuntu 12.04. It was rebooted due to the spectre/meltdown issue. Anyways, it wasn't responding and when I checked the droplet through the access console I see that the Digital Ocean Droplet Recovery System is up. I then powered down my server, created a snapshot, and then created a new droplet from the snapshot in order to troubleshoot. With the new droplet setup I have tried going through the recovery system.

  1. I tried first to follow this: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/lost-access-to-sites-servers-and-known-good-backups-won-t-boot. The top response goes through a process of selecting the grubloader, going to shell and rebooting. Didn't seem to do anything.
  2. Next I selected option 6 (Install a Digital Ocean provided Ubuntu 16.04 LTS Kernel). Again nothing happened.
  3. Filesystem check seems to pass
  4. Install/Update kernel on disk does nothing.

Not sure what else to try here.

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8 Answers
gamrtrust February 16, 2018
Accepted Answer

So after 30 hours with no help from the DO support I was able to bring back the server back using this method:

  1. Shut down your droplet
  2. Go to the "Kernel" tab and choose the first 12.04 kernel
  3. The kernel will install itself. Now while still offline, choose the "Digitalocean Grubloader v0.2" kernel. So we install first the 12.04 kernel and then switch to the Grubloader v.02, both when the droplet is offline without bringing it back between the installs.
  4. Switch the droplet on
  5. Open the console and type your regular root user and password.

That's it.

And by the way, digitalocean support sucks. go to hell.

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encomendadordeofertas February 15, 2018

we are having the same problem. DO team, please help

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encomendadordeofertas February 15, 2018

we are already using GrubLoader v0.2 kernell but droplet is down please help

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gamrtrust February 15, 2018

This also happened to me yesterday. The DO support doesn't help at all. I have 20+ droplets that are running and now if they reboot they are going to get lost. frustrating.

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xMudrii February 15, 2018

You should try contacting the Support team, they should be able to get it sorted out for you.

As this is older Droplet, maybe you have to switch to the GrubLoader2 kernel. The How To Update a DigitalOcean Server's Kernel tutorial shows how you can do this.

Also, Ubuntu 12.04 reached its End Of Life. To be protected against Spectre/Meltdown and other security issues, I strongly recommend you to upgrade to newer version (16.04 recommended).

How To Update a DigitalOcean Server's Kernel
by Adam LaGreca
Updating the kernel on your DigitalOcean Droplet is a straight forward process that differs slightly based on the Droplet's operating system. In this guide, we'll walk you through the process of updating your kernels for DigitalOcean Droplets.
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gamrtrust February 15, 2018

We are also using GrubLoader v0.2 and the droplet is down. No help from DO team!!

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kometsoft February 21, 2018

Had this problem as well, just powering the instance off and on again worked for me.

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BradIsbell May 4, 2018

This worked. Had the exact same issue. Thanks for the help!

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