Cannot Boot into Raspbian with BerryBoot and Twister on SSD Drive

Question

I have a raspberry Pi4 8GB and have installed it in an Argon One M.2 Case with a Kingston 128GB SSD Drive. When viewing a tutorial on how to set it up I opted to install BerryBoot in order to have the option to multiboot into a couple of OS's. I added Twister OS and Raspbian Desktop Lite Booting into Twister is fine, however booting into Raspbian it stalls at:

A Start job is running for /dev/disk/by-label/boot (37s / 1min 30s)

Then this eventually times out waiting for device.

"You are in emergency mode. After logging in, type "journalctl -xb" to view system logs, "systemctl 1 reboot", to reboot, "systemctl defualt" or exit" to boot into default mode.

Cannot open access to console, the root system is locked. See sulogin(8) man page for more details.

Press Enter to continue"

The then says its reloading system manager configuration

Starting default target

And then just loops back to You are in emergency mode.

Any ideas how to resolve?

Is there a BerryBoot Forum?

Answer 1

With the given information, it seems that the bootloader cannot find the root partition. I don't know how BerryBoot works but the error message is also given by the Raspberry Pi OS, if it doesn't find the root partion as specified in /boot/cmdline.txt. So you should check this file. It seems it has only set a placeholder root=/dev/disk/by-label/boot there and not the real root partition. I'm a little unsure why it is pointing to a boot label. Anyway, you can try to replace it with the correct root partition device name. To be on the safe side I would use the PARTUUID of the disk to address it. You can find it with:

rpi ~$ sudo blkid

Locate the right partition and use its PARTUUID for the entry in /boot/cmdline.txt, for example:

root=PARTUUID=738a4d67-02

It's a problem that you can't run the RasPi to execute blkid. But the PARTUUID is a property of the SSD drive. You are able to get it if you can mount the drive on another (linux) computer or boot the RasPi with a spare SD Card with a Raspberry Pi OS Lite.