Live USB Kernel Panic error?

Question

I tried to make a 14.04 live USB with Universal USB Installer. I get to the screen where it says Try Ubuntu, Install Ubuntu, etc. but no matter what I select, it eventually ends in this error;

end Kernel panic - not syncing: VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(2,0)

Does anyone know how to fix this? The computer that this is on is a Dell Inspiron 1545. I've seen a few cases around where you had to format the flash drive as FAT32, but I tried that and it still displayed the same message.

Sorry if this is a duplicate. Any help is appreciated!

Solution 1

The most common reason for such cases is that the bootable USB disk is not readable - either because the hardware is failing, or because it was not written properly, or the image was corrupted during download.

• Retry in a different USB port
• Check the image integrity ( see How can I check the integrity of a downloaded Ubuntu CD? )
• Redownload, possibly reformat the live USB disk to FAT32 ( see Setup Error: end kernel panic - not syncing: vfs: unable to mount root fs on unknown block(2,0) ), write the live image again
• If problem persists (especially if the boot is suspiciously slow), try with a different USB drive.

Solution 2

I had the same problem and eventually found the answer here:

Kernel panic on boot up with 13.10 live-USB

In my case, the format of the bootable flash drive was not a format that windows could understand. I needed to format the flash drive as FAT32 and then use unetbootin to make it bootable again.

Comments

[Prashant Chikhalkar]

suggest links in comments, this is not an answer

[Isaac Betesh]

I flagged as probable duplicate as well as posting the answer here. I felt that the connection between the two questions wasn't so obvious, so I wanted to add a little more detail. If it's possible to delete the answer, I will gladly move it to a comment.