Mint 19.1 crashing

[ssfc72]

About a month ago the Mint 19.1 on my Dell Inspiron notebook (dual boots with Win started crashing on me.  During booting I noticed there were brief flashes on the bootscreen with numerous error messages of something to do with ascpi?? (i believe it this may relate to Dell having issues with the way they monitor the power jack on notebooks??).

Then either the notebook booted to a command prompt, instead of the Desktop or it would boot into the Desktop but it was frozen and I had to press and hold the power button to shut down the notebook.
This boot issue happened about the time when I applied a Mint update that was showing and I believe the update did have a kernal update, included with the other updates.

The command prompt mentioned something about doing a fsck.  So I had Mint 20 on a bootable usb thunb drive, I booted from the thumb drive and did a fsck of the sda9 partition that Mint 19 was located on.
There were a multitude of errors in the file system that I had to say yes to, and fsck fixed them.
Then I was able to successfully boot into Mint 19 again.  However after a few boots Mint 19 again failed to boot or froze.

Kal suggested that because the Dell had an SSD and the computer was a number of years old, that the SSD partition that the Mint 19 was on, may have reached it's maximum number of read/write cycles.
The Win 8 on the notebook was able to boot and run without problem.
Kal suggested I download the repair/diagnostic software from the SSD manufacturer, to test the SSD.  The Samsung diagnostic software for my model of SSD, Samsung Magician would only run under Windows and it would not recognize ext4 partitions.
So I wiped the Mint 19 partition and made it an NTFS.
However when I ran the Magician software it came up with various functions that it would do but when I ran the diagnostic part it said my drive was not supported???

So I used gparted to again make sda9 an ext4 partition and I booted from the Mint 20 usb thumb drive and installed Mint 20.1.

So far I have had no issues at all booting into Mint 20 and it works very well. :-)

Edit:  I also ran a virus check with the ClamTK software, during this period of crashing and Clam did not find any problems.

[buster]

Marilyn's computer runs mint 20.1 or .2, not sure. No problems until an update and it rebooted to a command prompt and told me run a file check. As in your case I agreed to many queries with yes,yes,yes....

It rebooted into the regular system and has run well ever since.

Just noting we had none of the crashing problems you did - just the one request to check files after that odd update.

[Jason]

Then I was able to successfully boot into Mint 19 again.  However after a few boots Mint 19 again failed to boot or froze.

Glad it's working for you now. It's very rare, to the point that it almost never happens, that an update in Linux completely disables a machine like that. But a video driver included with the kernel may have. Question: have you applied the update that happened before the problem since you did a fresh install? If it happens again, try and note if there were any other updates. And also do a Timeshift system point before you apply it and try restoring it with a boot disk that has Timeshift on it (like Linux Mint).

You can also test if the SDD drive is the source of the problem then by installing LM to an external drive if you have one. Not to keep it that way, just to test the hypothesis. But with any luck, you won't have it again. I hate intermittent issues like that. They're so hard to track down. Remember you can check your system logs for errors. The on you mentioned was probably ACPI. I've had that warning on every computer I'd have Linux on the last few years. I believe it's related to some feature of power management not available. It can safely be ignored. You can look at boot logs by typing:

Code Select Expand

dmesg | less and looking through it. There are older versions, too. Once you find something you're interested, note the name of the feature with the error (e.g. network, ethernet or VGA, etc.) and then grep it like this:

Code Select Expand

dmesg | grep VGA

and you'll see only the lines related to that function.

[ssfc72]

Thanks for the tips Jason.
I did one huge update, after MInt 20.1 (when I downloaded Mint 20.1 and put it on my usb Thumb drive, that was a number of months ago) was installed and did not have any problems result from it.

. Question: have you applied the update that happened before the problem since you did a fresh install? If it happens again, try and note if there were any other updates. And also do a Timeshift system point before you apply it and try restoring it with a boot disk that has Timeshift on it (like Linux Mint).

[Jason]

Interesting. I wonder if it was a combination of updates recently. I'll hunt around to see if I can find out anything.

Oh, btw, forgot to mention. You mentioned you had to force a shutdown. That's probably what prompted the fsck. EXT4 reduces the need for an fsck most of the time with its journaling features but sometimes it still happens. I remember back when fsck were a regular thing every time you turned off a system improperly. Back in the 90s, I think it was. That's before Buster's time. And most of the time, it's not actually corrupted files, just broken links to them.

Fingers crossed you don't have any more issues.


Note: Even though you already resolved it, I've moved this to the Support board for easier reference. Good to have the problems all described in one place. You never know when someone else might want to follow your troubleshooting steps when/if it happens to them.

[fox]

Why don't you just install the current version of Mint?

[ssfc72]

I just wanted to do a follow up report.
After a month, since I installed Mint 20.1 (my install is now at version 20.2), I have not had any more problems with the Dell Inspiron notebook computer crashing.  So it appears there was nothing wrong with the SSD partition, being worn out with read/write cycles.

It is very strange that the previous Mint 19.1 Distro that was on the notebook, would start crashing after a kernal update and there was nothing that I was able to do, to fix the problem.  The fix was to install Mint 20.1, in the existing partition of the SSD.

[Jason]

Thanks for the update. As for the kernel update causing the problem, in your boot manager, there should be an option to boot using the previous kernel version. It might be listed under "advanced mode" or something similar. I haven't tried Linux Mint in a long time but I'd expect them to have this. Most distros seem to. It doesn't help you now but perhaps it might another time.

[ssfc72]

Ok, thanks for the tip, Jason.