[SOLVED] - Major Maui Meltdown.

[kdemeoz]

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?

[leszek]

It's hard to tell what's the issue.
It might be a filesystemcheck running in the background.
Can you disable the splash by pressing escape to see the terminal during boot?
Or can you even remove the splash parameter from the boot lin in grub (Press e on boot entry in grub remove the splash and quiet parameter and hit ctrl+x to boot)
It should give you verbose output on the screen about the boot process.

[rocky7x]

Indeed, more info is needed from the boot process. However, this seems like a hardware issue. I had some similar behavior in the past when my hard disk started "creating" bad sectors and when it had problem reading sectors (problem with disk mechanics), where system files were stored. With such stochastic behavior, I wouldn't rush to blame the OS (Maui in this case) for the failure.

[kdemeoz]

It's hard to tell what's the issue.
It might be a filesystemcheck running in the background.
Can you disable the splash by pressing escape to see the terminal during boot?
Or can you even remove the splash parameter from the boot lin in grub (Press e on boot entry in grub remove the splash and quiet parameter and hit ctrl+x to boot)
It should give you verbose output on the screen about the boot process.

Hi. I haven't tried another reboot yet, but rather than me trying to edit grub during the boot, can't i do that now b4 booting? Here's my grub file; what should i change pls?

Code:

GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub/themes/maui/theme.txt

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

I'm not 100% sure, but i did think i did try ESC when the splash appeared. 

If i can get the verbose output to appear, will it be possible for me to save it to a file that later i can upload here?

Thanks.

[kdemeoz]

Indeed, more info is needed from the boot process. However, this seems like a hardware issue. I had some similar behavior in the past when my hard disk started "creating" bad sectors and when it had problem reading sectors (problem with disk mechanics), where system files were stored. With such stochastic behavior, I wouldn't rush to blame the OS (Maui in this case) for the failure.

Oh dear, that's horrible potential news, after a pretty demoralising day. I feel sapped of energy now, so think i'll leave it alone til tomorrow. Why ruin only one day when i can ruin two instead? Thanks.   

[leszek]

Hi. I haven't tried another reboot yet, but rather than me trying to edit grub during the boot, can't i do that now b4 booting? Here's my grub file; what should i change pls?

You can do that aswell though this will change it permanently until you change that file again.
So remove the quiet splash so it reads

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""

After that run sudo update-grub to update the grub config.

[kdemeoz]

Thanks. I haven't edited anything yet, coz when re-looking at my grub file i found some potential problems / errors. Could you pls comment?

Remember this older thread; https://forums.mauilinux.org/showthread....0#pid39930. As a consequence of that i had added this line [back on 22/10 (but i've done LOTS of reboots since then & never had this problem til today)]:

Code:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

However [& i don't understand WHY i never noticed this til now] i had added that line, not edited one of the existing lines, so now i'm worried that lines 2 & 3 [of the standard default Maui grub] are conflicting with the added line 4:

Code:

GRUB_THEME=/boot/grub/themes/maui/theme.txt

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=""

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nomodeset"

Should i remove / comment-out lines 2 & 3, then try another reboot, before then [if still necessary] removing the quiet splash from line 4?

[leszek]

Please try what I suggested and edit grub from grub please.

[fanisatt]

It's seems possible to be a hardware problem !
If you have installed the OS in a SSD (I remember you have SSDs), try this command in the konsole : sudo fstrim -v / .
I have also the OS in a SSD and I used to run this command once or twice a week. (Normally, the system runs fstrim on a weekly basis but I like doing it myself, just to be sure.....!
And something else.... I hope your PSW (power supply unit) is "strong" enough to support your specific hardware demands ! If you have 2-3 disks , demanding graphics card and other PCI expansion cards , USB devices (powered by the PC) ...etc..etc... you need a decent 650W PSW .
Keep your eye to the PSW !!! It can cause crazy situations......
I hope you fix the problem.

[kdemeoz]

It's hard to tell what's the issue.
It might be a filesystemcheck running in the background.
Can you disable the splash by pressing escape to see the terminal during boot?
Or can you even remove the splash parameter from the boot lin in grub (Press e on boot entry in grub remove the splash and quiet parameter and hit ctrl+x to boot)
It should give you verbose output on the screen about the boot process.

"It might be a filesystemcheck running in the background. " --> if it is, how can i tell? What can i do about it?

"Can you disable the splash by pressing escape to see the terminal during boot?" --> No, ESC does nothing.

"Press e on boot entry in grub remove the splash and quiet parameter and hit ctrl+x to boot" --> yes this stopped the skyblue Maui splash screen appearing, but instead the screen then just stayed black except for a low-res pixelated rectangular border near the screen edges. Nothing happened after this [& i retried this many times], so i had to re-reboot.

"should give you verbose output on the screen" --> no, it did not, just a mostly black screen as per preceding answer.

Ever since this fault first occurred several hours ago, 100% of the time i now cannot do a normal boot up. The only way now i can boot into eventually a plasmashell & login to get back to a desktop, is to select the kernel Recovery option in the initial boot menu. Whilst this fright was giving me heart attacks, this workaround is at least working each time... so far.

PS - I have now commented-out line 2 of grub file (in case it was conflicting with line 4), & updated grub. It did not help anything, but also does not seem to have made anything worse.