I have been working all day and I was about to use yast for some housekeeping but the machine failed to respond and mouse didn’t control anything. Eventually the mouse disappeared so I has to use REISUB. Machine stopped but booting gave me errors I didn’t recognize but all the instructions to check (I think) journalctl logs didn’t help as I had no response on console. Looks serious so please could somebody guide me as to what I should do next before I make things worse. I could boot to a USB or a live DVD but would appreciate some first steps please.
Budgie2
The most likely cause is a file system problem. I would normally try “fsck”, but that probably won’t help for “btrfs”. I’m not sure what’s the “btrfs” repair tool.
Try booting a live image from USB. If that works OK, mount the partition containing your / filesystem. If that works, report it here.
FWIW fsck does not work on btrfs. If you are on btrfs, try booting a snapshot. When that does boot properly, run
sudo snapper rollback
If you can boot from a USB memory stick, rum a memory test for one hour at least.
If the fsck does not show errors or is not usable, run badblocks in non-destructive mode.
Disconnect all hard drives and other devices connected to motherboard, then connect one-by-one, and boot from USB memory stick every time.
There are many other things to look at, in hardware, OS and software, but first tell what is the outcome when booting form external USB device.