For many years now I've been an avid windows & mac user. Most recently, the growing love-affair between tech corporatists and government bureaucrats has convinced me to take the plunge into the world of open-source. My transition was going smoothly up until I F'd the boot process. For days now I've been trying to resolve this problem. I figure--before I completely start cry running back into Tim Cook's arms--I should ask the smart folks on here for help.
Background
My linux distro is setup on a single partition with encrypted LVM (sda5_crypt). There are two kernel images (4.19 & 5.9) available on the boot partition. I may have messed up my initrd image while doing a sudo apt-get purge --auto-remove lvm2 or possibly while monkeying around with the crypttab and/or fstab files followed by a sudo update-initramfs -u.
The Big Problem
Now after GRUB loads kernel 5.9 into memory, I am greeted with the following screen.
As you can see, before I am dropped into the initramfs shell, the kernel is searching in /dev/sdd and so forth. Also, the vgscan and pvscan show "no medium found" on /dev/sdd and so forth. Of course! This is strange since the distro is setup on sda5. I'm also unable to exit out of the shell. For reference, here's a print-out of all my block devices from the initramfs prompt.
Attempted Solutions
I've tried--without real success--temporarily changing the root= parameter in the GRUB Bootloader, duplicating initrd image (4.19) for initrd image (5.9), etc. Perhaps one silver lining here is that, when selecting kernel 4.19 image from the GRUB boot menu, I am able to successfully decrypt the disk and boot into the distro's shell. But how the heck then am I supposed to update-initramfs for kernel 5.9 when I have kernel 4.19 loaded!?! It feels like the twilight zone.
Any suggestions from you linux veterans is very much appreciated!