Anthony BosioUbuntu MATE crashed the other day while @jaymeb was just using the browser and then it started booting to initramfs prompt. I just booted into a USB live session involving fsck, lsblk, df, vgchange, mounting the boot drive and looking at syslog, and chrooting in. I can’t really see what is wrong. There were some PCI Bus Errors in the syslog. Also the end of syslog was several lines of just “&^” repeating.
Admittedly the drive is an old SSD but it was formatted 10 months ago before installing Ubuntu.
We don’t have any important files on there and it seems I could recover anything needed, but having to nuke and pave to recover always takes a toll on my Linux confidence.
I pulled the WiFi card, and that did not fix booting. I pulled the gpu and I don’t think that worked either. Hard to confirm because I don’t have integrated graphics, but the machine did not seem to show up on the network with the Wifi card back in. Also, the WiFi works when booted into a Live session via USB thumb drive. Reseating the gpu did not fix. 😮💨 Really bummed about this. Headed out of town in a week. Wife will have to fall back to ye olde Mac mini.
cc @hydrian
Hydrian@hydrian SATA cable? I really can’t figure this out. I just spent another hour poking around. Tried using ChatGPT to help since I don’t know all the boot and disk stuff so well. Didn’t really come up with anything conclusive. Booting from a live session works fine, but I wasn’t able to boot from spinrite to try and check the drive. Any ideas? Thinking I should just get a new drive or M2 SSD.
@abosio PCI(e) bus errors aren't usually caused by bad SATA cables. SATA cables usually cause transmission timeouts and then the SATA controller resets the port once it gives up. This would be true for a bad SATA drive.
@hydrian So what hardware are you thinking?motherboard? It’s 7 years old with an Nvidia 1080ti and a WiFi card on it.