Computer running slowly for last week just "died"
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Hi there!
I've been running Trisquel for about a year now.
For the last week or so my computer has been running slowly. Programs take longer to load, actions take longer to perform, etc.
I ran a system monitor and saw crazy spikes in CPU usage. Memory usage was normal. So, I chalked it up to one of my programs hogging CPU power or something and figured the next system update might fix it. The slowness was tolerable so I wasn't overly concerned.
Last night things took a turn for the worse. When I went to unlock my computer screen, the option never came up for me to type in my password. It was stuck on the background screen. I tried rebooting and that seemed to "work." The startup was really sluggish, though, and that scared me. I attempted to perform a backup. That, too, was very sluggish. It's a slow process normally but this was extra slow. It was working, however and so I decided to go to bed in the hopes that it would be finished by the time I woke up.
Well, when I woke up today the auto-screen lock had kicked in and it wouldn't let me unlock it. So, I rebooted. It wouldn't boot at all.
I checked how far my backup came along on the external HDD on a different computer. It probably only got about 50% of the files.
At this point, I don't know if the problem is with my CPU/Motherboard or if the HDD is toast. I've put in a live USB and it loads. It is very sluggish though. Even when I get to the screen that allows me to F10 into boot options, it takes a long time to load. But, once in the live USB is seems to be fairly quick. So, I'm just confused all around.
While I do have full backups of my HDD they are somewhat old and I'd really love to be able to salvage things.
So, right now the two things I'd like to do is figure out what the problem is and hopefully salvage the files on the HDD.
If I try to let it boot up without the live USB, it gives me this error "reboot and select proper boot device"
Note, I haven't made any changes to my BIOS or tinkered inside my box, so this confuses me.
Any help you can provide in this matter would be greatly appreciated!
Might the heasink need thermal paste to be re-applied (guides for which exist online, often for specific laptop models if it's a laptop)?
It's a desktop. I've just opened it up and removed all of the dust build-up. Everything appears to "look" good by my amateur eyes.
I don't have much experience in this area, but this sounds to me like a classic case of hard drive failure. Are you able to put your hard drive in another computer, or use some sort of USB adapter, to check it?
If that's the case, you're going to want to do what you can to recover any files you weren't able to back up (I have no idea how this process goes; you might want to take it to someone more knowledgeable), or otherwise accept the loss, and get a new hard drive for the computer if you want to keep using it (shouldn't be terribly difficult).
I do have another very old desktop, but I don't know if I could just plug in the SATA HDD and expect it to boot into Trisquel, considering the old computer has much different hardware. It might not even have a SATA port or whatnot. It would be nice if I could somehow plug my HDD into an existing computer and treat it like an external HD, with which I could simply browse the files on it and transfer them over, or something. I don't know how to do that.
Any info you could give me on doing that would be awesome.
If it turns out to simply be the HDD for sure, then yeah, I could get a new one and I'd probably be fine with my old backups plus whatever I was able to salvage from my 50% backup last night. But before I do that I want to be reasonably sure that it is the HDD failure causing the problems.
Some new information here:
After removing all of the dust bunnies from inside the computer and writing down all of the information on the HDD (just in case I need to replace) I hooked everything back up and restarted it.
It took me to this error:
error: attempt to read or write outside of disk "hd0"
Entering rescue mode...
grub rescue>
Is there something wrong with grub maybe or is this evidence of HDD failure?
Also, I should note that yesterday was the day that I ran updates which included new linux images, Trisquel Base, etc.
Another new development.
I was about to see if I could do a fresh install from live usb. But when I was in the boot menu I decided to try the HDD one more time. It actually took my to my grub option between normal and advanced option for Trisquel. I chose the normal. Then it took me to the screen it goes to when it prompts for my Encrypted HDD password, but the password box never came it. It just sat there for a couple of minutes, then took me to a new screen. The new screen reads:
BusyBox v1.21.1 (Ubuntu 1:1.21.0-1ubuntu1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
(initramfs)
I still don't know what all of this means. Thanks again for reading!
New, possibly helpful information.
I decided to run a live USB on Trisquel and see if I could access the files that way.Keep in mind that my HDD is encrypted.
In the Trisquel Live USB, I clicked on the files folder. Then I saw my HDD under Devices. So, I clicked on it. To my hope and surprised it asked me for my password to decrypt the drive. Unfortunately, my hope was short lived when it returned this error:
Unable to access "941 GB Volume"
Error mounting /dev/dm-2 at /media/trisquel/(longstringofcharacters): Command-line `mount -t "xfs" -o "uhelper=udisks2,nodev,nosuid" "/dev/dm-2" "/media/trisquel/(samelongstringofcharacters)"" exited with non-zero exit status 32: mount: /dev/mapper/trisquel-vg-home: can't read superblock
I have no idea what that means, but doing some searches I stumbled across this: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/util-linux/+question/251641
And that guy had extremely similar issues as me; computer froze, rebooted, put in the password to decrypt HDD, gets presented with an (intramfs) prompt, uses live USB to boot into trial mode, then gets an error that is very similar to mine.
The awesome news is that the guy who responded seemed to offer advice that fixed the problem. The bad news is that his advice was way over my head. If anybody could translate that for me and walk me through the commands I need to do I suspect it will get it to work.
I just don't feel like this is a hardware problem. I mean, maybe it's a motherboard or HDD, but my it seems software related to me. Would definitely love being able to recover things and go about my life without having to buy a new hard drive or computer. Also, the extra bad news is that the backup I did last night actually won't restore. I guess all of those files I'm sitting on can't be access because the backup wasn't allowed to fully finish. Regardless, I'm not that concerned about it at this point, I'd like to salvage my HDD.
Thank you in advance for any help!!
It looks like an HDD issue to me. From the live system you can run "Disks" (in the "System settings") where you can self-test the disk (through the button in upper-right hand corner of the interface). That said, if you want to rescue data from a faulty disk, you had better not use the disk but to perform the rescue. There are several tools available. All the way down to GNU ddrescue. I do not know whether they work with an encrypted partition.
Running Disks shows the HDD as
Assessment Disk is OK, 65056 bad sectors
But when I click on the Play button (mounting button) it gives me the
Error mounting filesystem
error that is slightly different, but essentially the same as I gave above.
I can also click on the encrypted file system and attempt to mount that, but also get the error mounting filesystem.
I do not really understand how the disk can be considered OK with 65056 bad sectors... but if you consider it is OK, then go for 'fsck'. If the partition is /dev/sda3 (otherwise, adapt the command):
$ sudo fsck /dev/sda3
Thank you for your reply. It means a lot to me!
In terminal using the live USB trial I get this:
$ sudo fsck /dev/sdb1
fsck from util-linux 2.20.1
e2fsck 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014
fsck.ext2: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open /dev/sdb1
Could this be a zero-length partition?
$
Keep in mind that it's an encrypted drive and it's the entire 1 TB HDD, whereas the partition that contains all of my files is in the 941GB device /dev/trisquel-vg/home
Again, thank you for keeping my hopes alive!
I do not really know what happens if the partition is encrypted. But I know the partition should not be mounted when using 'fsck'. Does /dev/trisquel-vg/home exist even when the partition is not mounted? If so, try:
$ sudo fsck /dev/trisquel-vg/home
You can add the -y option, i.e. 'sudo fsck -y /dev/trisquel-vg/home', to always attempt to fix any detected filesystem corruption automatically.
I very much appreciate your help.
I ended up "solving" the problem by luckily stumbling on this link here: http://askubuntu.com/questions/192621/grub-rescue-prompt-repair-grub
I had managed to get lucky enough for a failed boot-up to drop back to the grub rescue prompt.
I used the command ls and got the output (hd0, msdos1)
Then I issued the same commands as the person on the link, but tailored for my system
set root=(hd0,msdos1)
set prefix=(hd0,msdos1)/boot/grub
insmod normal
normal
And that actually helped get me in. So, I guess the main issue with this thread has been "solved."
That being said, my computer is still running super slow, throwing lots of errors, and sometimes still crashing. It's in a barely usable state. I still don't know what the reason for all of this is, but I read somewhere that screwed up grub settings could also cause system errors besides just inability to boot.
I managed to backup the files I needed. I ordered a new HDD with which to install Trisquel on and see if a fresh install will make everything good again. If it does, then I think it's safe to say that my motherboard/cpu are good. That narrows the issue down to either a software issue, possibly from a bad update, or the HDD itself. I'd rather not have to do a fresh install on my old HDD, but if I do and it fixes things, then I will deduce the problem was strictly software related.
If anyone has any ideas how to diagnose the problem from this point, now that I've got access, I'm all ears!
With over 65,000 bad sectors, it is indicting that your HDD is approaching imminent failure. One of the corrupted sectors could possibly have been in your boot sector which is why grub was no longer working properly. The more you use the drive, the more likely further damage is going to result. The commands you issued literally reset the grub bootloader for where to look for further instructions (in order to boot properly) and the HDD reassigned the data to non-corrupted portions of the disk. You noted you've made a backup already of the important files which should always be top priority when encountering an HDD issue.
Boot a minimal live cd/usb with repair tools (duckduckgo it, there are a lot) and attempt to repair the drive. Magic Banana mentioned using gddrescue so a quick link you might want to check out:
https://superuser.com/questions/347916/rescuing-a-hdd-with-bad-sectors-dd-vs-gddrescue
If you want a LOT of very useful and technical information on filesystems and hard drive recovery, you must check out the My Hard Drive Died podcast with Scott Moulton. Scott Moulton does computer forensics/hard drive recovery, is an expert witness in criminal cases, and has taught all the three/four letter agencies this information both here and abroad.
If you continue to use the drive, it will produce more bad sectors until it finally dies. You are much much better off using the new HDD you bought. That being said, I have somewhere between 5-10 hard drives that are definitely dying and still being used. The key is that they are ONLY used for non-critical applications and testing purposes (such as testing recovery tools). I know these drives will eventually give out sooner than later, at which point I have other uses for them (such as taking them apart). The majority of the information I learned about hard drive recovery came from Scott Moulton. So again, if this type of thing interests you, check the podcasts out.
Lastly, best of luck!
Wow! Thanks very much for all of the help I received on this thread.
I think I'll just start a new installation of Trisquel on the new HDD.
I really appreciate all of the tips given for repairing the drive and further investigation. It's nice to know that it probably was a bad HDD, and not something wrong with my cpu/motherboard/RAM and NOT something wrong with Trisquel. =)
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