Stuck at 'Loading initial ramdisk...' after pinning kernel

[Prefix4138]

I made the mistake of running an update before pinning the kernel to `6.8.12-8-pve`, and now I'm stuck at 'Loading initial ramdisk...' after every reboot. I've unpinned the kernel while in maintenance mode, but I'm still stuck at the same message. What steps should I take to solve this issue?

 

[Prefix4138]

Booted into recovery mode and it revealed it was having trouble mounting an external disk specified in fstab. Weird because the light indicator on the drive showed it was active, but I had to reconnect it in order for it to be mountable again. So the updating and pinning had nothing to do with this issue; just bad timing.