Hi there people, I’m back with another conundrum. Lately, my machine shuts down at random and after eventually rebooting, things remain normal for a while. During the rebooting process the attached screens appear. One shown by the motherboard info screen indicates that a power surge has occurred during start up although there is nothing to suggest a power issue in the logs.
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Provided ‘unable to mount’ message I’d suspect hard drive accessibility problem. That is some HD sector may ‘flap’. Actually, there are many possible reasons for a sector to become unreadable. Some of them may be temporary, say, overheating and/or mechanical connectivity and some may be a telltale sign of ongoing HD degradation.
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This may be worth taking a look at:
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You could also boot from a live USB to check whether the hard drive might be failing, using fsck for example.
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If you can get the system booting again without replacing the boot drive, I would recommend checking the drive with SpinRite, a software tool from Gibson Research Corporation (GRC | Hard drive data recovery software ).
I first used SpinRite in 1989 to recover a month’s worth of my work from a 10MB HDD in an IBM PC-AT computer when the HDD started acting up. I purchased a license in January 2026 to try to recover data from a failing 11-year-old Western Digital 1TB HDD. Unfortunately, that drive was non-recoverable.
SpinRite is not free - which is one downside.
SpinRite uses FreeDOS, which is another downside for UEFI-only systems. Gibson Research has published instructions for creating a bootable Linux USB drive with a virtual machine to launch SpinRite on UEFI-only machines. Using this method, SpinRite may be slow to analyze a drive.
I know, I know…it sounds like I’m advertising SpinRite. I view SpinRite as one of the few tools I’d pay to keep in my “computer toolbox”.
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I seem to have got around that issue. For some reason the boot order changed! I also removed kernel 7.0.0.28 from the grub menu.
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