On 30/07/2021 15:54, Bev Nicolson wrote:
I've done that (5 passes not 10, mind, but it took nearly 5 hours) and no errors, curiously.
How do I proceed with the live disk? What would I be looking out for to report back on?
If it was me, I'd try booting from the live disk and
1) checking all the hard disk partitions on the machine (except any partition that's formatted for swap, as there's not a fsck for that).
It's perhaps easier to launch the test from gdisks (Disks) or gparted if either is installed. Alternatively, you'll have to work out what your partition names are and do a manual fsck on each of them.
e.g.
sudo fdisk -l
snip Device Size Type /dev/sda1 [snip] BIOS boot /dev/sda2 [snip] Linux filesystem /dev/sda3 [snip] Linux swap
I'm not aware of how to fsck a bios_grub partition, or a swap one, so I'd have to check /dev/sda2
read up on fsck to get the right flags.
If you have more than one hard disk, check them all. If you have a RAID array, or you are using LVM (Logical Volume Manager), do more research first otherwise you could break things by using FSCK.
2) Does your system work if you run it for a while from the live disk? If it does work, it's likely to be some software on your installation that's gone wrong. If it does not work, it's likely to be a hardware error.
Not using the live disk, you can check the time when your computer crashes, then examine the log files and see if anything happened at that time. Personally I like the command line app lnav (sudo apt-get install lnav).
you can use lnav to look at several log files simultaneously. e.g.
cd /var/log sudo lnav auth.log auth.* dmesg dmesg.*
then you can scroll up and down to the time the machine crashed and look for errors.
Good luck
Steve