Can anyone explain what it means?
Yes, or at least, what it is usually indicative of (but this probably won't get you too far in solving the problem). Either:
The kernel does not have access to the drivers necessary to mount the root filesystem partition, or
The root filesystem the kernel has been told to use does not exist.
The first one is unlikely with pi kernels because those drivers are usually built-in.
On a (normal) distribution that uses a root filesystem on a second partition, it could happen if you have a missing or incorrect cmdline.txt
in the boot partition. It should be all one line and contain:
root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 rootwait
However, raspbian-ua-netinst doesn't work this way and cmdline.txt
will not refer to the location of a root filesystem, because it uses an initramfs file -- actually there are two of them to match the two kernels (one for the ARMv6 models and one for the ARMv7/8 models); kernels can be built with the relative path of this file hardcoded into them.
These are the installer-rpi[N].cpio.gz
files.
If you are installing from windows, you will have downloaded and extracted a .zip
file. Make sure everything including those .cpio.gz
files is correctly copied onto the card.
cmdline.txt
contains the following;consoleblank=0 console=ttyAMA0,115200 kgdboc=ttyAMA0,115200 console=tty1
– Lee Jul 05 '16 at 10:25ua-netinst
uses a single FAT32 partition. – Lee Jul 05 '16 at 10:36installer-rpi2.cpio.gz
to the SD card. – Lee Jul 05 '16 at 11:04.cpio.gz
file is an initramfs; if you look inside there (you'd needgzip
andcpio
) there's a filesystem using busybox as the userland core. Good luck! – goldilocks Jul 05 '16 at 11:11