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Alright, long story short, I've been running a copy of Raspbian Lite for a while on a RPi 4, off a MicroSD card. I'm using it along with a couple of USB3 drives as a makeshift NAS, where I store my media for my Plex Media Server. It's been running really well for a while, until today.

This evening, I realized it won't boot anymore, and the message I was getting was the ol' "Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)". I've looked it up, been trying to find a way to fix it, but no luck so far. The last thing I've tried is from this thread: Kernel panic-not syncing: VFS: unable to mount root fs on unknown- block(179,6) running Raspbian on top of NOOBS

But I keep bumping into write-protect issues.

I'm not sure at this point if it's fixable, and being the dumb noob I am, I did not have a backup of my SD card...

One thing I picked up on during my research is the ability to boot the RPi from a USB drive. I had an old 120GB SSD collecting dust somewhere, with an enclosure, which should be a lot more stable than a MicroSD card. Using another guide and a fresh install from a different MicroSD than my bad one, I installed Raspbian Lite on the USB SSD, and now it's booting perfectly from it.

With that in mind, I'm now a lot less interested in fixing the old SD card back into functioning if this setup is viable.

Where I'm stuck is: is there way to copy my entire setup, users, programs, mounts, etc... from my "bad" MicroSD, onto my new fresh install on my SSD, effectively making it effectively an exact clone of my old setup, avoiding me from having to set up everything all over again?

I see a lot of guides on how to clone an existing, correctly running install onto a different card or USB drive, but I can't seem to find a guide on how to clone one's setup from a bad, but mountable, readable SD card... I've confirmed that I'm able to mount both partitions in read-only mode, so I have access to all the data.

I have backed up both partitions to separate directories on my SSD install using rsync.

I'm assuming it wouldn't easily be done by just copying all the data onto the corresponding directories on my new install, but hey... wouldn't be nice if it was that easy...

Any thoughts? Thanks in advance

ardendolas
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2 Answers2

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It's possible that you can repair your SD card with fsck; aka e2fsck & fsck.vfat. There's a recent answer that will walk you through the process. This may not help, but it's not a huge effort - "nothing ventured, nothing gained" as they say. You might also review man e2fsck for background.

Since you are now booting from a USB SSD, you may be able to run fsck with the SD card inserted in the RPi's card slot. Before you do this, make sure the SD card is not mounted - verify this with lsblk --fs.

Good luck & follow up in comments if you have questions.

Seamus
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0

Do not attempt to apply ANYTHING in that link, which is a different error.

What the message means is partition 2 (of whatever drive contains the root file system) is CORRUPT, or missing.

What you are suggestion may be possible to a sufficiently skilled user, but most wouldn't even attempt this with a faulty OS and creating a bootable SSD is not entirely straightforward.

If you want to attempt recovery you can mount the SD on a linux computer attempt to repair, but this is often not successful and risks further data loss.

Your best bet is to save your data (which you have done) perform a fresh installation on a new SD Card and restore what user data you can recover AND next time make a backup.

I would mount the old SD Card on the new OS (see below script) and use rsync to copy what I could. NOTE this needs to be a selective copy to avoid overwriting the new OS.

#!/bin/bash
BOOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA1'
ROOT_MOUNT='/mnt/SDA2'

Check/create Mount Points


if [ ! -e $BOOT_MOUNT ]; then
    mkdir $BOOT_MOUNT
fi
if [ ! -e $ROOT_MOUNT ]; then
    mkdir $ROOT_MOUNT
fi
    echo "mounts " $BOOT_MOUNT  $ROOT_MOUNT
if [ -e /dev/sda ]; then
    SD1='/dev/sda1'
    SD2='/dev/sda2'
else
    SD1='/dev/sdb1'
    SD2='/dev/sdb2'
fi
echo $SD


Mount Partitions


if ! $(mountpoint -q $BOOT_MOUNT); then
    mount $SD1 $BOOT_MOUNT  # mount partition containing boot files
fi
if ! $(mountpoint -q $ROOT_MOUNT); then
    mount $SD2 $ROOT_MOUNT  # mount root partition containing OS files
fi
Milliways
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