Raspberry Pi Forums

Hi guys,

I've been tearing my hair out at my new Pi for the last 2 days trying to get an OS to boot on the damn thing, I've done some trawling on the forum and so far have not turned up anything that has helped me to fix this issue.

I am using a stock-clocked Pi, standard RS power supply, Sandisk 16GB Class 4 SD card (which is painfully slow, I just spent something like 3 hours waiting for the thing to format), generic USB keyboard and wireless Microsoft Arc Mouse.

I have formatted the SD card several times now with the SD formatter utility and have tried to install both BerryBoot and the newest version of Raspbian (with Win32DiskImager) with similar results, both complain of issues relating to not being able to mount the filesystem on the SD before it even gets chance to install. The message that appears right before kdb is started when I attempt to install Raspbian is "Kernel Panic: VFS : Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block". I have tried starting the Pi both with and without the USB devices plugged in, unfortunately it makes no difference; given that the card appears to work perfectly fine within Windows I am fairly sure the card isn't the issue either.

Is anyone familiar with this issue? I'm very much new to linux (every time I attempt to extend the olive branch I have hit frustrating issues like this one and decided it isn't worth the hassle despite wanting to learn) but am fairly technically-minded, although given the Pi is completely unresponsive when this issue occurs so there isn't a whole lot I feel I can do to trace the issue.

I'm happy to try pretty much any longshot at the moment, let me know if you would like any specific information to help isolate the issue (I know there is not too much in here, unfortunately I am at my partner's house and don't have the Pi with me to pull any specifics up).

Is the partition pointed to by your cmdline.txt (eg. root=/dev/mmcblk0pX) actually the correct partition to be booting from?

I had a similar issue with a different distro, I removed a swap partition during installation and it would give a similar error. I realised later the installer was setting root at p3, while removing the swap at p2 would make the pointer wrong. Perhaps this is what is happening to you?

I have the same SD card, and yes it is painfully slow. It shouldnt take 3 hours to format it, and install the os. Im copying a backup image to mine now via dd (full 16gb) and I think its gonna take a bout an hour judging by the speed. My other card does it in half the time...


Some users have reported issues with the newest version of rasparian.

did you format the card before trying to run win32disk prog ?

Sorry it took so long to reply, I didn't get chance to look at the Pi again until last night, though I did manage to solve the issue.

I looked at the cmdline.txt file first and the partition setup looked fine to me, and the card was formatted before writing the image just to be sure it had the best chance of working.

After several more attempts at getting the image on I borrowed a spare SD card from a photographer friend and managed to persuade BerryBoot to work after a couple of attempts and am now at the point of being able to boot into a 09-2012 Raspbian image.

It seems odd that the card works under windows and not for the Pi, my only guess is that I just have a bad block at a really inconvenient place on the card and have just been really unlucky on this occasion.

Thanks a lot for taking the time to help, I really appreciate it, hopefully this thread can help someone else in the same boat.