I recently started getting this error during bootup on an SD Card with Raspbian Stretch-Lite:
---[end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)
I looked around online for similar errors and two methods were suggested to try and fix this -
Plug in the SD card as an external into another linux computer and run fsck on it: When I do this, it tells me there's a dirty bit, and I go through the prompts to fix the dirty bit. But the problem persists when I boot and every time I reboot and do fsck, the dirty bit reappears.
Change cmdline.txt to set root=/dev/mmcblk0p6. When I do this, the unknown block simply changes to (179,6). For now, I've set root=/dev/mmcblk0p2.
Does anyone have any further ideas that I could try? I have data on this SD card and I can't seem to see the data partition whenever I mount the card - I can only see the boot partition.
Thank you for your help.
sudo fsck -f -y /dev/xxxx
run against it. Easiest is to do that with the SDCard in a USB reader on your Raspberry (booted from another working SDCard). – Dougie Jul 27 at 13:45