[Solved] Crash/freeze and corrupt superblock after reboot

[tobe_b]

Hi, I recently installed Linux Mint 20.2 on my old Thinkpad T440s with a 256G SSD. After maybe a day or so, the machine wouldn't wake from suspend and after reboot I was dropped to the grub rescue command. So I reinstalled. After a few days of happy use, software starts freezing and trying to run stuff in the terminal returns gibberish. After reboot, back to grub rescue. This time, I took out the SSD and copied images of the partitions to my desktop computer with ddrescue. Running fsck on the image showed "invalid superblock", but could recover the filesystem. Files seem to be intact, but I'll restore from backup later to be safe.

The only special thing I did is to use LUKS + LVM. (On the first install which failed almost immediately it was ext4 directly on LUKS.) Funnily enough, the partition table and LUKS/LVM headers were not affected, only all the ext4 filesystems, /boot and /. I would have understood /, since something was probably writing to that partition at the time of crash, but /boot should not have been touched for a while.

Memtest86+ does not report any errors for the laptop. The machine worked for years before with Fedora (also LUKS encrypted). The disk is a LITEONIT LCS-256M6S (as reported by SMART), which should be the original SSD if I'm not completely mistaken. I think I never opened the laptop before today. smartctl does not report any errors and a SMART self test also finished successfully. There were also no errors reported by ddrescue when making the images.

Now, I guess the most likely explanation is that the disk failed despite the lack of SMART errors (not sure if Lite-On SSDs are good quality, would have hoped for something better in these expensive Thinkpads), maybe some intermittent problem with the drive. Just wanted to ask around if anyone else had any problems with LUKS and/or LVM or ext4 filesystem corruption in Mint 20.2 specifically. Don't really want to reinstall again after a few days with a new SSD.

[deepakdeshp]

Unless you have special reading avoid encryption. Recovery of the data becomes very difficult if something goes wrong. Use veracrypt images if you must encrypt.

[tobe_b]

This is a laptop, encryption is mandatory. I would in fact not recommend anyone to have an unencrypted laptop with any kind of important information on it (think about all the login data you probably store on there, if someone has access to your e-mail account, they have access to almost anything). What if that thing gets stolen?

If you are telling me that LUKS in Linux Mint is buggy, I'll have to change distributions. I've been using LUKS on all my Linux computers (used mostly Fedora and Debian up to now) for ages now and never had these problems at all. Why prefer veracrypt, given that it is less well integrated in Linux, given its proprietary license?

Also, data recovery is (in my opinion of course) a bad argument. I don't want data recovery, I have backups. Data recovery from bad hardware can always fail.

[tobe_b]

I have a new SSD in use for over a week now without problems. I recovered my previous installation from backups and am still using LUKS+LVM. Take-home message: Random filesystem corruption is likely a hardware issue, at least with a proven stack (ext4, LUKS, and LVM are quite old and battle-tested now). Also: always keep your backups up-to-date

Will update if problems pop up, but so far I think this is solved.