Linux Mint 18.2 suddenly won't boot - stuck on splash screen

[harisano]

Hello Linux Mint community ,

I would have loved for my first post on this forum to be a little more cheerful, but unfortunately I am freaking out right now, because my one and only school PC (Lenovo X220) with a lot of important stuff on it won't boot.

I have no idea what happened - I was working on it. I had noticed that it become insanely hot - Psensor showed CPU temp around 90 degrees celcius. Also, my HDD (256 GB SSD) free space was running low, so I had gotten some notifications about cleaning up space. After I finished my work, I decided to shut it off a little bit, and then clean up free space after I booted up again.. sadly, that never happened.

Situation now:

• If I just try to boot normally, it hangs on the Linux Mint splash screen

• I can force GRUB boot menu by holding shift down. And when I am there, I can choose the second option, go into the Advanced options for Mint, and boot to recovery succesfully. Onyl, I don't know where to go from there... [Bonus info: When going through all the processes while booting into recovery, most of them are a green [OK]. But sometimes there are some "failed". I managed to see what some of them were and it said: "Failed to start Light Display Manager"

• I have not made modifications to any hardware or anything before this problem started.. Unless the aforementioned high temperature fu***d something up?

I am running Linux Mint 18.2 with MATE environment, 64-bit. My PC is an older Lenovo x220, with an i7-2620 CPU, 16 GB of RAM, and a 256GB SSD HDD. NO second graphics card.

I dont know why, but I have a funny, scary feeling that something is wrong with the hdd, but I don't know how to test it.

I have been trying to search the forums for similar problems, but I couldn't really find anything similar (and new enough) to my situation.

Please help me.

Best,
- H

[harisano]

Hi all

Just a quick update:

So, I made a Live USB with Mint 18.2, and it booted up just perfectly. However, I'm not sure what to do now?
I tried running Gparted and did a Smart Data & Self-Test; Disk is OK. See img here:

Although some (to me) strange messages popped-up. Like this one; "Libparted warning" that "...the physical block size is 2048 bytes, but Linux says it is 512 bytes." See img here:

Also, could someone maybe explain to me, real quick, where this "unallocated space" on /dev/sdb comes from? See img:

Anyway, back to topic. Anyone got an idea where to go from here? I guess this means that hardware-wise, I'm OK. Which is an awesome thing, coz the thing I was worried about the most was my data. At the moment I feel like grabbing everything I can get a hold of (data-wise), copying it to an external HDD, and do a clean Mint install from scratch. But maybe there is a smarter way?

Cheers,
- H

[Moem]

So, I made a Live USB with Mint 18.2, and it booted up just perfectly. However, I'm not sure what to do now?

Grab your data before you do anything else. Whatever happens next, you will have that.

[harisano]

So, I made a Live USB with Mint 18.2, and it booted up just perfectly. However, I'm not sure what to do now?

Grab your data before you do anything else. Whatever happens next, you will have that.

Yup - on it!

- H

[catweazel]

I dont know why, but I have a funny, scary feeling that something is wrong with the hdd, but I don't know how to test it.

Boot the live media and backup your treasured stuff while you can.