Yesterday a friends PC which was running Manjaro KDE Testing started having issue. At first I thought maybe the latest round of updates had gone sideways, but when I went to rollback his system I noticed he only had 3 Timeshift snapshots when there should of been at least 12. I selected 1 from the 20th and when the desktop booted there was no change. I noticed that 1 of his external drives wasn’t showing and his Manjaro and Windows drives were showing up as SDA and SDB instead of NVME drives. His mother board has 2 M.2 slots. Slot 1 is PCIe 4.0 and slot 2 is PCIe 4.0. I believe whatever caused the damage to his installed Manjaro is hardware related because when I reinstalled Manjaro it took almost 30 minutes to install when before it was under 10 minutes. I noticed during attempting to setup the system several features missing from Plasma. All signs point to a bad install even though for what is there the system seems stable. I want to run a full hardware check to see if the drive that went down damaged the mother board or if maybe something went south on the mother board thus breaking the OS and basically killing the 1 external drive. So in a nutshell I’d like suggestion on programs that can test all the hardware including the mother board. Thanks
Side note I went through his bios 2 times and all is set as it should be, so no setting there to cause the issue.
Thanks but like I said I’m looking to test all the hardware before even thinking of doing another install of Manjaro to see if it was just a bad install. I won’t swear to it but I’m willing to bet the corruption of the OS was due to hardware failure which means till I track down the issue there is no point in playing under the hood or reinstalling.
You could use something like hw-probe, but since its hardware, you dont need to rely on any specific OS … and you could use something like ‘UltimateBootCD’ and go from there. Arguably such tools (like memtest) may be preferable.
Guess I’d prefer a stand alone app or suite of apps in ISO format that I can just toss onto my Ventoy key. I’ll have a look at the info for UltimateBootCD. Thanks
When a system like Manjaro acts up it is usually due to misconfiguration or actions based on guess work rather than actual knowledge. Very often - also with Manjaro - choices presents where you need knowledgde on how to proceed.
The issue where Manjaro installs as BIOS when Windows is EFI is one of such situations.
I suspect a great deal of XYproblems involved in your task at hand.
A word of advise - next time up for reinstall - do not use btrfs - unless you are prepared for the extra troubleshooting and maintenance.
Thanks for the link and I’ll have a look, but as I clearly stated I am sure it is hardware related and NOT OS related. The file system is not the issue. I recognize the symptoms. Slow to install, hardware not recognized correctly, once in the OS missing components and or software. Both his Windows and Manjaro are UEIF and he hadn’t been in Windows for weeks before this happened so that’s not the issue. My best guess at this point is that the one drive went tits up and damaged the OS, but doesn’t explain why his two M.2’s are reading as sda and sdb. As for EXT4 simply no cause we lose the snapshots during boot and then have to chroot into the OS to rollback. I do appreciate the advice and suggestions, but in this case they’re not going to be of help. As for guess work NOT, I know what’s what in the BIOS.
You are the guy with hands on - you know what to do.
I have nvme which is listed as a sata device - how they are seen by the system depends on how they are connected. In my case the nvme is connected on PCI-e card.
To be honest it’s been so long since I installed the OS for him the drives reading that way my be normal. He has a habit of going for the cheapest which means SATA based M.2’s is very possible. I just want to completely rule out any other possible damaged hardware. Thanks agin for the link.
Update on this. Looks like even though he has both PCIe 3.0 and 4.0 M.2 slots he is using M.2’s that read as SDA and SDB instead of reading as NVME drives. I just got around to checking his hardware thoroughly and no issues that I can find. Manjaro is back in, updated, switched to testing, updated again and all looks good now. Thanks cscs and linux-aarhus for the suggestions.