9th November 2016, 8:22
Hi. A very bad scary problem befell my Tower's Maui today. I am finally, after ~an hour, back with it running again, but something is still quite wrong. I'll try to summarise from memory what happened, & hope that you can guide me to what i should look to for the root cause, & what needs repair.
1. Tower uptime had been 3.x days. Resumed this morning from overnight Suspend, without incident.
2. No software installed or removed today, except Slimjet browser updated to v12.x.
3. Had several hours of incident-free working.
4. Went to launch another browser [Vivaldi-Stable]. It seemed not to respond, so repeated the launch attempt.
5. Still seemed no response, but noticed it had several processes running in KSystemMonitor. As i pondered what was happening, Vivaldi finally opened.
6. I closed it again, but the processes still showed in KSM. I tried to kill them in KSM, but it [KSM] would not respond.
7. I ran sudo killall vivaldi-bin in Konsole, but the processes remained.
8. I logged out & in again, but nothing improved.
9. I initiated a Reboot. This is where everything went seriously bad.
10. During the boot, the Maui SplashScreen appeared as usual, BUT, instead of proceeding to the actual login screen, the Splash was replaced by 2 thin horizontal bars in Maui-skyblue, about 80% down from the top of the screen, that for less than a second i could see held white-font text of some message, but almost instantly vanished leaving only the 2 blue bars. I repeated the Reboot more times that i can recall, but never would it behave normally, always got stuck at this step, & never could i actually read the text.
11. Now when i rebooted for the umpteenth time i selected the 4.4.0-42 kernel instead of my usual 4.4.0-45 kernel, but it made no difference.
12. Next reboot attempt i chose the 4.4.0-45 Recovery option, & picked the check files option [i now cannot remember the proper name for it]. It didn't seem to find any errors, but then told me it was returning to the previous screen [or something like that, i now can't clearly recall], where it told me something about it was now going to boot but that it might fail ... something something something ... about maybe needing a full graphical reboot [???]
13. It then presented a normal looking login screen, so i logged in [totally confused about what the hell was happening].
14. The plasmashell desktop seemed to build ok, but when i tried to connect to my VPN, i was blocked by a prompt to enter my KWallet pswd but it was rejected [just like in my recently solved separate thread].
15. Exasperated & cranky, i tried another reboot, but #10 repeated.
16. I repeated #12 & #13, & this time i was able to connect my VPN without the Wallet failure [which is actually weird, coz looking in the System Tray now, Wallet is not even open!].
That more or less brings me back to the present. It seems that i can no longer do a standard boot [WHY???]. What on earth happened? This big scare came out of nowhere, there were no signs of impending disaster. What is that crazy unreadable 2-bar 2nd SplashScreen? Whatever it is, WHY can i not read it? What can i do to fix this mess [i call it a mess, coz even though at the moment i appear to be back inside a normal plasmashell, everything that lead to this point was wrong & bad, & i can't have any confidence in the system integrity till the root cause is eliminated]?
Desperately looking fwd to your wise words pls?
1. Tower uptime had been 3.x days. Resumed this morning from overnight Suspend, without incident.
2. No software installed or removed today, except Slimjet browser updated to v12.x.
3. Had several hours of incident-free working.
4. Went to launch another browser [Vivaldi-Stable]. It seemed not to respond, so repeated the launch attempt.
5. Still seemed no response, but noticed it had several processes running in KSystemMonitor. As i pondered what was happening, Vivaldi finally opened.
6. I closed it again, but the processes still showed in KSM. I tried to kill them in KSM, but it [KSM] would not respond.
7. I ran sudo killall vivaldi-bin in Konsole, but the processes remained.
8. I logged out & in again, but nothing improved.
9. I initiated a Reboot. This is where everything went seriously bad.
10. During the boot, the Maui SplashScreen appeared as usual, BUT, instead of proceeding to the actual login screen, the Splash was replaced by 2 thin horizontal bars in Maui-skyblue, about 80% down from the top of the screen, that for less than a second i could see held white-font text of some message, but almost instantly vanished leaving only the 2 blue bars. I repeated the Reboot more times that i can recall, but never would it behave normally, always got stuck at this step, & never could i actually read the text.
11. Now when i rebooted for the umpteenth time i selected the 4.4.0-42 kernel instead of my usual 4.4.0-45 kernel, but it made no difference.
12. Next reboot attempt i chose the 4.4.0-45 Recovery option, & picked the check files option [i now cannot remember the proper name for it]. It didn't seem to find any errors, but then told me it was returning to the previous screen [or something like that, i now can't clearly recall], where it told me something about it was now going to boot but that it might fail ... something something something ... about maybe needing a full graphical reboot [???]
13. It then presented a normal looking login screen, so i logged in [totally confused about what the hell was happening].
14. The plasmashell desktop seemed to build ok, but when i tried to connect to my VPN, i was blocked by a prompt to enter my KWallet pswd but it was rejected [just like in my recently solved separate thread].
15. Exasperated & cranky, i tried another reboot, but #10 repeated.
16. I repeated #12 & #13, & this time i was able to connect my VPN without the Wallet failure [which is actually weird, coz looking in the System Tray now, Wallet is not even open!].
That more or less brings me back to the present. It seems that i can no longer do a standard boot [WHY???]. What on earth happened? This big scare came out of nowhere, there were no signs of impending disaster. What is that crazy unreadable 2-bar 2nd SplashScreen? Whatever it is, WHY can i not read it? What can i do to fix this mess [i call it a mess, coz even though at the moment i appear to be back inside a normal plasmashell, everything that lead to this point was wrong & bad, & i can't have any confidence in the system integrity till the root cause is eliminated]?
Desperately looking fwd to your wise words pls?