Error: Can't mount root

Help and Support Raspberry Pi
1

Hi,

I’m trying to install OSMC on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 32GB microSD card. I have tried both the Windows installer(on SD card) and writing images 2016.05-1 and 2016.06-2 with Win32DiskImager. Every time I plug the SD card in the RPi it start formatting the device, and I end up with “Error: Can’t mount root”.

The SD card is a class 10 card that I have successfully used several times with different distributions before. The RPi and the power adapter are 1 week old.

Here is an example install.log

Thu Jan 1 00:00:07 1970 Starting OSMC installer
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Detecting device we are running on
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Mounting boot filesystem
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Trying to mount to MNT_BOOT (/mnt/boot)
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Using device->boot: /dev/mmcblk0p1 and FS: fat32
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Preseed file found, will attempt to parse
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Found a definition for storage: sd
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Creating root partition
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 From a root partition of /dev/mmcblk0p2, I have deduced a base device of /dev/mmcblk0
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Determined 255 MB as end of first partition
Thu Jan 1 00:00:14 1970 Calling mkpart for device: /dev/mmcblk0 and fs: ext4 with start 257M and end 100%
Thu Jan 1 00:00:16 1970 Calling fmtpart for partition /dev/mmcblk0p2 and fstype ext4
Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
Stride=2 blocks, Stripe width=1024 blocks
2035824 inodes, 8129280 blocks
406464 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
249 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8176 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624

Allocating group tables: 0/249 done
Writing inode tables: 0/249 done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: 0/249 2/249 4/249 6/249 done

Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Mounting root
Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Trying to mount to MNT_ROOT (/mnt/root)
Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Using device->root: /dev/mmcblk0p2
Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Error occured trying to mount root of /dev/mmcblk0p2
Thu Jan 1 00:01:13 1970 Halting Install. Error message was: can’t mount root

2

Which brand?

4

Brand is SanDisk

5

Bought from where, and how old is it and has it been used before for anything else ?

Sandisk is the most counterfeited SD card brand on places like Ebay. Many counterfeit SD cards report themselves to be bigger than they really are - for example the card may report itself as 32GB but it’s really only 4GB.

The deception is not discovered until you actually try to use locations on the disk past 4GB, at which point it will fail.

Either that or the card is faulty - try a different card.