After working for a while, hard reboot has led to persistent error message: Kernel Panic: VFS : Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block (179,2)

[killias2]

My RetroPie setup was working fine for a long while but, recently, it stopped. Long story short, after playing a game, I decided to quit. When I quit, the RetroPie went into this unstoppable cycle (unfortunately, I can't remember the text). After waiting a bit for the cycle to end, I decided to unplug and plug the RetroPie back in to force the issue. In retrospect, perhaps this was ill-advised, but that seems to be the only real remedy when seeing these issues on a Pi..? In any case, when it rebooted, everything started normally, but then I saw the text mentioned in the title and it stopped. There is also space for keyboard entry, I believe. Further reboots have no impact on any of this.

Something seems to have gone wrong with my microSD card or the installation? I don't really know how to fix this, and I was hoping for some advice? I get a lot of similar results when I search, but they seem to be for lots of different situations. Any idea how I can fix this with minimal effort? Am I going to have to rebuild the image and all that?

[mitu]

@killias2 Looks like a failing SD card or corrupted filesystem. Without a Linux installation to access the SD card and try a filesystem repair, re-install might be the only option.