Hi People, just when I thought that I continue on enjoying Ubuntu, it throws a ‘curve ball’ at me! I leave my PC on permanently and overnight something weird has happened. I first noticed that the desktop picture was missing and then Vivaldi refused to open. I had a number of mounted network drives and they disappeared. I tried rebooting but the UEFI boot menu offers what appears to be Four versions of the SSD to boot from (confusing!) so I tried each one alternatively. No luck. Even weirder still is that when I attempt to boot, the machine starts part of the install procedure again. Anyway, I continue on and nothing changes. Any ideas please?
1 Like
That sounds like filesystem corruption on your SSD. Something happened overnight, maybe a power blip you didn’t notice, and it’s messed up your root partition. That would explain all of it, the missing wallpaper, Vivaldi not opening, network drives gone, and the installer trying to kick in on boot.
I’d boot from a live USB and run sudo smartctl -a to check the drive health.
You might need to sudo apt install smartmontools first. If your files are still accessible from the live session, back them up to an external drive before doing anything else.
If SMART is showing errors, the drive might be dying and worth replacing.
If the drive checks out okay, a fresh reinstall is probably still your fastest fix. All your files should be in /home. I know it sucks but last resort if it does not magically start working.
The multiple UEFI entries are usually old boot entries that pile up over time, shoulkdnt be an issue.
Okay, I installed smartmontools but the machine does not recognise the command sudo smartcl -a
You have to add the path to your drive. I included a link to the instructions. For example, sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda or /dev/nvme0n1 etc. Use fdisk -l to see the names of your partitions.