On 22 March 2017 at 21:31, Adam Bower adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Right, but if your swap partition is on that disk and you can't read/write any temp files etc. etc. then you get pretty much exactly the symptoms you describe in that everything appears to have stopped working but you can still move the mouse.
I know the symptoms you mean, and have seen them before; I'm pretty sure that the clock doesn't stop in that scenario though.
However, if it happens again I should be able to check: either it should be logged in syslog or there'll be nothing at all in the logs after that point (if the root partition was also affected and switched to read-only). So it's definitely something I'll check out if it fails again (it didn't fail overnight, but that means nothing).
Note that the new PC only has (for now anyway) 8GB RAM, where the old one had 16GB, so the new one should be making more use of swap and more likely to fail if sudden loss of swap is the problem.
In fact a simple script writing continually with a sleep every minute with the output of dmesg to a network mounted filesystem or to a port on another computer which has netcat running on it may help show up any more detail about the problem.
That's a good suggestion, I'll give that a go if it fails again. (Obviously it makes more sense to do it before it fails, but at this point I'm optimistic that maybe the driver switch may be enough. If it fails again I'll know that it wasn't and that more failures will follow that I can capture.)
I'll also do some disk SMART checks.