[4.398471] - Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0.0)

[krasz...@gmail.com]

Had qubes-os installed on 64gb USB stick. Was everything working fine for 1 day. Yesterday I was in the VM manager and saw updates available for dom0, whonix and fedora. Through the terminal I started the updates. Took a while but all three was updated. Today I started to launch Qubes again and got this error.

[4.398471] - Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (0.0)

[4.398508] CPU: 0 PID: 1 Comm: swapper/0Not tainted 4.4.38-11.pvops.qubes.x86_61 #1
[4.398571] 0000000000000000 0000000073d2c1cb ffff8801583fbda8 ffffffff813b1a93
[4.398667] ffffffff81a3ec60 ffff8801583fbe40 ffff8801583fbe30 ffffffff8119ea2e
[4.398762] 6230002000000010 ffff8801583fbe40 ffff8801583fbdd8 0000000073d2c1cb
[4.398858] Call Trace:
[4.398884] [<ffffffff813b1a93>] dump_stack+0x63/0x90
[4.398912] [<ffffffff8119ea2a>] panic+0xd3/0x215
[4.398940] [<ffffffff81d54580>] mount_block_root+0x201/0x294
[4.398969] [<ffffffff81d54678>] mount_root+0x65/0x68
[4.398996] [<ffffffff81d547b5>] prepare_namespace+0x13a/0x172
[4.399025] [<ffffffff81d5422a>] kernel_init_freeable+0x205/0x229
[4.399056] [<ffffffff8174d4b0>] ? rest_init+0x80/0x80
[4.399085] [<ffffffff8174d4be>] kernel_init+0xe/xe0
[4.399112] [<ffffffff8175948f>] ret_from_fork+0x3f/0x70
[4.399140] [<ffffffff8174d4b0>] ? rest_init+0x80/0x80
[4.399172] Kernel Offset: disabled.

[cooloutac]

you sure the updates finished successfully. I had a similar problem once because of sleep issues. When pc wake from a long suspend it sometimes freeze, or only work partially. One time I was able to start an update, but got errors. I hard powered off and rebooted and then got and unable to mount root fs and only a grub prompt.

are you getting a grub prompt? I'm not sure if I used a grub prompt or the qubes live usb. and then mounted the root partition and then did fsck to fix it.

[cooloutac]

What I did was boot the qubes installation iso and chose troubleshooting. Then booted into recovery mode prompt.

Then did chroot /mnt/sysimage then did fsck -y /dev/mapper/dom0_root

It went through pages of errors it said it fixed. then I rebooted and qubes started with no issues.