Ubuntu 9.10 Error: Initrd is too big

Simple Solution

Unplug any external hard drives you may have and restart!

Hoping

I hope Google takes care of this and makes this post number one. After installing Ubuntu 9.10 and working for a day with no problems I restarted (not the first time) and received the error;

Initrd is too big

That’s it, nothing else. So of course I went to Google on another machine to search for a solution that error. There are way too many of these errors for different versions of Linux so I trimmed the search by adding “Ubuntu 9.10” at the end of the search. Keeping the quotes that way tells G that this term carries the most weight.Still nothing! I was down to the third and forth pages, and now this was taking too much time. Luckily I came across an old post, when Karmic Koala was still in beta, that was related to an external USB hard drive problem. I thought to myself, no way,  but I tried anyway.

Unplug the external hard drive, restarted perfect!

I am not sure why, but now I have to unplug my hard drive to restart my computer. I can deal with that, but it’s weird that this just started and it didn’t happen yesterday.Note: I have tested for hardware problems and there were none.If anyone knows has a better solution, please let me know.