I was using xfce4-terminal to copy files from one luks partition to another luks partition. Both on a pci-e x4 drive. While waiting I was reading this forum. After about 7 minutes the DE disappeared and I was shown a text-only screen, just like if I had pressed [ctrl]+[alt]+F{2-6}. The text showed filesystem error on /dev/nvme1n1p6, which is my /home. This partition is not encrypted, and was not part of the copy operation. The error message repeated itself about every 3 seconds.
Then I pressed [ctrl]+[alt]+F1 - it showed something else. I tried all the other ttyās as well, all of them showed something else. I could not find the screen showing the errors. All though, if I stayed with any of the ttyās for a few seconds, the error would pop up there as well.
I ended up removing /home from my fstab and reboot.
Then I did fsck.ext4 /dev/nvme1n1p6 - it said filesystem was clean.
So I tried fsck.ext4 -f /dev/nvme1n1p6 - still no errors found.
So I tried fsck.ext4 -fc /dev/nvme1n1p6 - it reported it had done changes to the filesystem. (How could I find out what it did?)
I put /home back into fstab and rebooted.
Now I wanted to see the status of my source luks volume. It looked good.
So I opened the destination luks volume. It mapped ok, but when I ran mount, xfce froze. I could move to mouse around. I could type into the other terminal window (I had two terminal windows open. Ran mount in one of them.) And thats all. There was no response when clicking any panel, nor the desktop, nor the whisker menu, nor any hotkey. I tried to start galculator from the working terminal window, resulting in that window also stopped responding.
I had a look at all ttyās, none of them showed any error. Finally I rebooted.
I tried the same mount again, as the first thing after boot. And the same thing happened.
After the next reboot I ran fsck.ext4, it claimed filesystem was clean. The same said fsck.ext4 -f. But fsck.ext4 -fc did some changes to the filesystem.
After this, I could mount the volume without trouble.
Status of the volume was that all files written during the copy operation had a size of 4k.
The problem here isnāt really that the cp and mount failed, but how xfce-terminal and the DE handles this. Is really xfce-terminal so integrated with the DE that a problem here will take down everything else?