busybox error

[rene]

It's actively cooled -- https://www.intel.com/content/dam/suppo ... Spec06.pdf -- so I still find that to be really hot at idle -- but of course it's less really hot than 72C. Oh well. I expect you now have a stable system. If you clean and repaste, to have a better stable system...

[bmike1]

nope... it crashed Again. I'm going to put the efi partition in and see if that helps.
it wouldn't boot so I had to reinstall. I'm upgrading right now.

[bmike1]

okay. I've reboot 5-6 times and no crash so things are looking up!

[rene]

The fact that it "crashed" (by which I assume you mean it again booted into BusyBox) even once is not a good sign; you should not have this issue ever period, not in thousands of reboots.

For good measure, try sudo apt-get install smartmontools and then sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda. Especially attribute 5 is interesting (Reallocated Sector Count) but there may also be others that show trouble.

Not that I expect it'll show an issue; still expect this be fully RAM-related. And maybe then still in turn via an overcooked memory-controller if temperature gets too high. You can (sort of) test that by artificially stressing the CPU: sudo apt-get install stress-ng and then stress-ng --cpu 0. Open a second terminal and with still sensors watch temperatures. Expectation on a regular desktop would be that it should not go over 80C; on that NUC I'd allow for 90C (note that it won't hurt the CPU; its own monitoring has it downclock itself when too hot). Preferably also try to browse around a bit or some such in the meantime so as to generate some disk traffic, and while stress-ng is still running reboot. You may see the issue again.

Still best test is to remove one of the DIMMs and see if the issue persists over a week or so.

[bmike1]

sorry... did not boot into busybox. it gave me a.... uhhhhh.... back screen with larger than normal text saying (can't remember) think it was someting about not being able to boot for some reason.
sudo smartctl -A /dev/sda
smartctl 7.1 2019-12-30 r5022 [x86_64-linux-5.15.0-41-generic] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-19, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 48
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 304155
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 010 Pre-fail Always - 1
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 3202
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 2397
100 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 2253056
101 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 471648
170 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1
171 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
172 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
174 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1219
175 Program_Fail_Count_Chip 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
176 Erase_Fail_Count_Chip 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
177 Wear_Leveling_Count 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 1564
178 Used_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Chip 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1
180 Unused_Rsvd_Blk_Cnt_Tot 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 681
183 Runtime_Bad_Block 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 21
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0033 100 100 000 Pre-fail Always - 1
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 052 100 000 Old_age Always - 52 (Min/Max 15/61)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 304155
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
201 Unknown_SSD_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
204 Soft_ECC_Correction 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 304154
231 Temperature_Celsius 0x0032 095 095 000 Old_age Always - 5
233 Media_Wearout_Indicator 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4661
234 Unknown_Attribute 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 3607
241 Total_LBAs_Written 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 3173
242 Total_LBAs_Read 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 3420
250 Read_Error_Retry_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 304188

After about 20 minutes of stressing the system it hit 80 C and 79 C

[rene]

After about 20 minutes of stressing the system it hit 80 C and 79 C

That certainly doesn't help to make sense of anything, because that's fine. But how that can relate to 72C or 63C at idle, no idea.

You as to the SMART parameters do have a nonzero raw reallocated sector count value but nonzero indeed: it's one. The normalized value still shows at it maximum so it seems this is not in fact an issue.

Attribute 1, the Raw Read Error Rate is high at 300K. You expect 0; I've personally seen this as a result of a wobbly SATA data cable but your /dev/sda is an mSATA SSD; relatively little opportunity for wobbly contacts. Temperature could again be an issue also there -- overheating controller -- but with the stress-test after 20 minutes leaving your CPU at 80C I have a hard time considering that very likely.

Together with a memory issue obviously being present, i.e., how the swapping helped, this is to say that the only remaining thing I have to offer is a suspected bad DIMM, and as to testing that to first yank one for some time and, if no issues, then the other; to run with 4G for a bit and see how you fare (or run memtest with either individually, but you "unfortunately" had no issues there with both either previously, even if only after swapping/reseating).

You may be able to tie the fault to one specific DIMM in that manner.

[bmike1]

You have been most helpful, Rene. Thank you so much. Currently I have no issues. Switching the positions of the RAM chips seems to have fixed it; however, now I know what the problem is if or when it starts booting into busybox again. More importantly I know how to fix it. I almost hope it faults again because I think I can use more memory and I want to up it to 16GB.

[Marie SWE]

Hi
I would try use one DIMM at the time to see if one is the problem.

As for temperature.. that CPU seems to have 2cores @ 1.1GHz
For fun, test Mint Xfce and see if it will make it go a bit cooler.
This statement I base on one of my first treads in here.. High CPU temp. viewtopic.php?p=1516045#p1516045 I got my laptop to drop over 15 degrees C from Mate to Xfce

Your computer seems dated back to 2013 that is 9years. Perhaps the cooling paste between the cpu and the heat sink starts to get old and need to be replaced. But testing Xfce is free, so test that one and see if you can get the cpu temp to drop a bit.

[bmike1]

first- I'm going to have new thermal paste put on.
then, if it faults again, I'll take out one of the RAM chips and run memtest86 then switch cards then replace the bad memory.

[bmike1]

I am now going toput xfce on...

[antikythera]

first- I'm going to have new thermal paste put on.
then, if it faults again, I'll take out one of the RAM chips and run memtest86 then switch cards then replace the bad memory.

Good luck, I hope those make a difference but would caution spending too much on repairing an NUC from 2013

[bmike1]

I ran senors and it reported that at just starting up the temp was around 55C and after I was running apt upgrade for 3 minutes it reported 74C. a minute after apt completed it dropped to 70. Two minutes later it only dropped one degree more

As for the age of this NUC it has only been used like for the past 5 years. before that it was in storage. before that it was used like five days

[bmike1]

well... putting xfce on didn't stop the busybox error so that means it MUST be the memory. Is that correct. I ran fsck again and that allowed it to boot again. Does that sound right? I ran memtest86 again for like 10 minutes but got no errors. How log should I let it run for?

[Marie SWE]

try one DIMM at the time and see what happens.

Sad to hear your temperature didn't go down with Xfce.
Your CPU is a bit weak, so that can be the main problem of the temperature when it needs to work hard for small things.
Start system monitor and see if you get 90-100% cpu usage.. if you do under a longer period(minutes), that's is the cause of the high temperature and then new thermal paste won't help much.

[bmike1]

how do I install system monitor?

[Marie SWE]

Xfce should have it installed.
as they translate even the app names, so its hard to guess what it is called in other languages.. In swedish Xfce it called "Aktivitetshanteraren" if they have just translated it straight off it should be named as activity manager.

I use gnome's as that one looks better.
To install that one.. open terminal and write: sudo apt install gnome-system-monitor that will install system monitor.

[Marie SWE]

The original menu in Xfce is boring.. so if you want you can switch to the better one that reminds more of cinnamon/kde/gnome menu and not like the old windows 95
Whisker menu looks like this.
.

.

'
If you want it you can add it by:
Right click on the empty taskbar, choose panel-> and panel settings.
Panel 1 and then go to the Tab (Object)
click [+Add] in the bottom left corner, a new window pops up.. scroll down to Whisker menu.. click on it to mark it, and then click [+Add]
Close the adding window...... (see last printscreen for how the add windows look like)
To get the menu to the right.... on the first window.. scroll down to Whisker Menu and mark it.. click the arrow up to the right to move it up to the top of the list.. The old Program Menu isn't anything to keep as you don't need to menu's .... so mark the old program menu and then click [-Remove]
Now you will have a much better menu the will remind a bit better of Cinnamon and KDE and with search function.

on this picture i also included system monitor, so you can see it.
.

[bmike1]

oh no! I had a kernel panic error. reinstall and hope it doesn't happen again.

[bmike1]

thank you so much Marie. It seems I already had whisker as the default. As for system monitor the search bar is telling me it is 'Task Manager'. CPU usage with no activity is around 25% but when I move my mouse rapidly it jumps to 40ish%. While memory usage is 20% of 8 gig..... I guess I don't need more memory.

[bmike1]

WOWZERS! I opened three webpages simultaneously and cpu usage shot to 100% but now that they are loaded the usage is about 20%.