New install of 21.0 XFCE, uninstalled some apps I didn’t need, set to a local mirror, updated, and then checked for errors. No errors except for in the journal where there are lots. Are any of them important and what are the fixes to all of them? Haven’t updated to the latest linux kernel yet btw. Currently on Linux 5.10.68-1:
Hi @squimton, and welcome!
While I’m not an expert in any way and might be wrong, I believe the errors, or at least one if not all, is caused by a faulty hard drive, or it’s connection.
I think this can be narrowed down by doing a SMART diagnostics test on the hard drive and checking for any errors:
smartctl --all /dev/sda
Please take note: I am in no way an expert and might be wrong. I just noticed the sda, which is a hard drive and that there is an I/O error error.
Hey! Thanks for the quick response! After installing smartctl, I got this: [all@all-hpnotebook ~]$ sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdasmartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5 - Pastebin.com
And that does seem to have a bunch of errors, is there anyway to fix this? I assume it will be to just buy a new hard drive or an ssd, but if not let me know, thanks a bunch!
From what I can see there, it looks to be just normal to me. I.e.: normal usage and you’ll have to just replace it. At lease at some stage.
What confuses me, and causes me to think it’s not critical, is that the errors are not registered as something having failed in the “Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds” table.
So according to me, that means the drive is failing, but nothing critical yet. Or, y’know, I might be wrong…
Thanks mate! Sure hope you’re not wrong!
I’m hoping so myself.
The moment your drive cannot even complete a short self-test, it’s compromised. Make sure you have a recent backup and a replacement drive ready.
Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error
# 1 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 10543 1667864
# 2 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 9354 684600
# 3 Short offline Completed: read failure 90% 8015 684600
# 4 Short offline Completed without error 00% 0 -
What he said, then!
Hi people who may have one of my problems! The first one:
Oct 08 19:34:44 all-hpnotebook kernel: x86/cpu: VMX (outside TXT) disabled by B>
Can be fixed by enabling virtualization technology in your bios, here some more info on it:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1297433/vmx-outside-txt-disabled-by-bios
I don’t know if the error was actually of any inconvenience but it deleted the error! And I don’t know if i’m just a dumb guy, but it reduced a big amount of errors? Or no?
Before:
Check the first post please.
After:
https://pastebin.com/2j5VeJHJ
Oh God.
Thanks for your help, what exactly do you mean by “compromised”?
You can start losing data and yield corrupted writes. Once a drive starts failing, how much the error rates and failures escalate is unpredictable.
If the data stored on a drive is valuable, you’re supposed to replace it and have a good backup copy of the data the moment before there’s a failure.
If the errors are only on file data areas (not the filesystem metadata), you might not notice obvious corruption or irrecoverability until you happen to come across an important file later on.
It’s analogous to gambling. You’re playing with risks, and that’s not worth it when it comes to important, valuable, unique, or sentimental data.
One can at least predict it will fail much faster if you try writing on it.
But yes, at this point, the safest thing to do is to procure yourself a replacement drive and move everything to it. And in the meantime, avoiding using your current drive.
Thanks mate, thankfully there aren’t much stuff in a completely empty drive, and I won’t really have much important stuff either, will buy a new drive as fast as I can manage.