Kernel Panic issue, want to preserve data

[cmac]

Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(179,2)

I had two rpi3 retropie setups so I gave one to a friend. After flying out back home and trying to boot it, he got this message (no idea what caused this either, I had successfully booted into retropie a few days before this occurred). I've seen a few help pages on this issue, but they seem to generally assume a bad installation and don't care about preserving any data currrently on the SD card. I put a lot of time into uploading games, adding the art and descriptions manually, so I'd really rather not start from scratch if possible. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to remedy this issue while preserving all retropie ROM and metadata?

[mitu]

Assuming it's not a SD card corruption - which wouldn't be out of the ordinary considering the error - you can read the card's contents from a Linux installation. If you have a spare USB stick, write a live Ubuntu CD on it and boot from the USB to a Linux installation, which can read the filesystem on the card so you might be able to recover its contents.

[cmac]

I'll give that a shot. In the case that I can back up the filesys, is copying + pasting the root of the filesys into a fresh retropie installation's filesys root work, or is there any more to it?

[mitu]

@cmac said in Kernel Panic issue, want to preserve data:

I'll give that a shot. In the case that I can back up the filesys, is copying + pasting the root of the filesys into a fresh retropie installation's filesys root work, or is there any more to it?

No, that's not the way to do it. Just back up the ROMs + BIOS folders and the emulationstation's configuration folder in /home/pi/.emulationstation to save your arkwork and ROMs. You can also back-up your configurations' folder (/opt/retropie/configs/all), but I wouldn't overwrite it on a new installation unless you're sure you have the same version of RetroPie as before.