Linux @programming.dev cosmicrookie @lemmy.world 1 wk. ago

Hardware issue

Today, i turned on my Mint pc and it wouldn't let me type in a passpowrd. Even the mouse was not reacting.

So i rebooted, got a massive text wall that mentioned something about not syncing

When i rebooted again, it wouldn't start up only a few rotations with the fans and then it restarts and repeats this loop

I assume that this is a hardware issue but what should i be looking into and how do i make the recovery as smooth as possible?

9 comments

fans start rotating for a few seconds and then it shuts down.

That could mean the CPU is getting too warm. Does the CPU cooler still work okay ?
- I've passed it over to my local pc store and asked them to troubleshoot the hardware. I'm pretty sure that it is the psu as it was replaced half a year ago for doing more or less the same thing. Maybe something is breaking my psu
Would the error happen to be "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!"?

I'd assume that you've either had your filesystem corrupt itself or had the storage device/controller fail. But, since you're making it that far, and I'm assuming this is a SSD, it's probably more likely it's corruption.

I'd start by booting to a USB stick and seeing if you can fsck the filesystem(s) on your drive.
- So.. it won't even boot at all now. Only rotates the fans a few times and shuts down. Could it be a powerfully issue
  
  Oof. Sounds like a anything-could-be-bad scenario.
  
  Assuming this is a desktop? I'd proabably start with the PSU, and go from there, yeah.
- Yeah that might be it!
  
  That said, im not making it that far any more. When booting up, the fans start rotating for a few seconds and then it shuts down. Then it will try again and just keep repeating the process of only rotating the fans again and again
  
  I'll try to see if i can boot off an USB. Any good links that explain what fsck is and how it works?
  
  Sure.
  
  This depends on the name of your block devices, but you'd probably want to do this in two runs: a test run, and then a real run to fix the problems.
  
  You probably can determine the drive name via lsblk -o NAME,MODEL command. You're probably looking for a sda/sdb/sdc device, though NVME drives may be named something else. Using -o NAME,MODEL gives you a column with the name and the device model which should make identifying what you're after simpler. Probably there's only going to be two devices listed, though: the USB stick and your SSD.
  
  You also want to identify the exact partition, ex. sda1, since that's what FSCK will want. You're probably going to need to do all the partitions on the drive.
  
  To fsck I like doing a dry run to see what happens since sometimes it's going to do things that are.... not strictly ideal: (replace /dev/device with the actual device name and partition, ex. /dev/sda1)
  
  fsck -N /dev/device
  
  Assuming there's nothing catastrophic that shows up, then
  
  fsck -y /dev/device
  
  to actually run the fsck on the filesystem.
  
  Couple of warnings: this COULD explode the data on your drive depending on what's broken, so if there's something you MUST have a copy of, try to get it first. Again, to be 100% clear: depending what's wrong you could lose every last byte of data on that drive.
I'm not sure if I can really help but, trying to get into the bios do you notice components not being listed? Like hard drives not showing or something suspicious about RAM or USBs?
- Ah... i saw your message before you deleted it. It sounds like a good tip. Will try and see if all drives are listed in the bios

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