Ever since i’ve upgraded to Leap15 from 12.3 (i think that was the old version), i get some strange HDD problems.
It’s an old Seagate (if i remember correctly) 7200 RPM SATA unit.
It boots normally but after a while everything just freezes and dies.
If i go to TTY1 and try to reboot, systemd spews something about not being able to sink something in a forever loop.
If i just do a hard reset, the SATA controller bios shows some garbage where it should have been the HDD list.
But if i power it down and immediately power it on, it works ok indeterminately.
Now i’m at a loss why it worked flawlessly with previous Leap and not with 15 …
I did an ext4 fs check offline that showed nothing.
The smart utility said all is good.
This behaviour is driving me insane and don’t know what to do.
I guess it might be a hardware or software induced problem but what ?
If you indeed upgraded from 12.3, I suggest you perform a clean install. Skipping that many versions is not supported, and the issue most likely is related to that.
I’m not sure it was 12.3 (can’t remember) but it was whatever version prior to LEAP 15.
I did a clean (i wiped the old installation) install, just kept /home as it’s on a different HDD.
I’d just like to debug this sucker.
If it’s the HDD hardware, i’d like to know.
If it’s not, that too.
I’m just out of ideas on what to do …
Some logs may contain something ? But which ones ?
Maybe i could run some diagnostic utility ? But again, which one ?
I don’t remember how i did it, i’ll run this test today as you suggested.
Yesterday, i had my kids watch a cartoon from the second HDD and all was well.
When doing shutdown i got thrown into the treminal with journalctl spewing lots of lines about not being able to open/rotate the log.
The last line said /dev/sda I/O error.
That means sda is unavailable or has some other problem.
As long as whatever is running now does not touch /dev/sda, all is ok.
As soon as anything even tries to touch sda, kaboom.
Such messages suggest a lack of freespace problem. Do you have ample freespace? Are you using BTRFS (the 15.0 default) on a / filesystem that is less than 40GB?
Hmmm, interesting ?
The FS is ext4 and size is about 20Gb
I think i have a bunch of Gb free.
Maybe about 4 ?
I’ll have to check.
Either way, why when this happens and i push the reset button the SATA controller firmware spews garbage and freezes instead of the usual foud device names?
Operating a machine with a defective drive can result in puzzling symptoms. To decide whether it’s a hardware problem or not, you need to remove the drive and operate the machine without it.
Oooh, that would be interesting ?
It would mean i’d have to reinstall everything on the other hdd which will be quite painfull since it’s just full with stuff.
Let’s say it’s a backup of the important things.
I wouldn’t want to mess around with it.
And i don’t have a spare SATA drive.
And running a LiveCD i don’t think will reveal anything ?
SATA SSDs start at some 20€/$. additionally yhey will give your machine a big performance increase. If you don’t want to spend this amount, you may try to shrink some partition on the second drive and clone the system partition to the space freed.
Ok, so i ran smartctl -t long /dev/sda.
The first time it just locked the whole system hard after about 30 seconds.
A poweroff and restart fixed it.
On second try it ran i left it overnight since i’ve started in the evening and could not stay awake for the 158 minutes it took.
In the morning, the terminal seemed to work but actually didn’t.
The system was broken but i could still switch to terminals (but of course could not do anything).
So i have no results from smartctl …
I have looked into SSD pricing and am surprised.
I had no idea they went that low on prices.
I’ll go consult the boss (the wife) and ask for a budget approval
So, having very little spare time, i did install Ubuntu, which i very much dislike for many reasons, just to confirm if it’s a hw problem.
Lo and behold, no more problems …
I’m at a loss as what on earth is going on …
What is Leap15 doing wrong and *buntu right …
I would just stick with it but, besides the hdd issue going away, there are other new “things” that drive me nuts about how *buntu does stuff …
I wouldn’t be surprised if *buntu doesn’t even support BTRFS, much less use it by default. Maybe it’s worth trying a reinstallation of 15.0 but with EXT4 / instead of BTRFS.
However, Ubuntu is probably using “ext4” for its file systems, while the openSUSE default is “btrfs”. You might try insisting on “ext4” in a Leap 15 install.
