After freeze, reboot, some apps fail

[cecilieaux]

My laptop running Sylvia froze repeatedly when I opened several programs I usually open together without problem. I tried various ways to reboot, was finally force to simply turn off the machine.

Now it seems some damage has resulted: (a) a Virtualbox VM froze and never worked again; (b) Chrome froze but now works; (c) Mintinstall asks for the password, the nothing happens after that.

1. How do I diagnose whether it is failing hardware?
2. Could my holding down the OFF button (after NOTHING worked to unfreeze the computer) to shut down the machine simply have zapped some crucial part of software? (How do I find out and recover?)
3. Don't know how to test the overall damage to other apps.

Sigh! What have I done?

[Petermint]

Hardware damage is unlikely from switching off. What can be damaged is the file system. Flash memory can fail to complete a write. Linux delays some writes up to a minute and changes to your system may have died half way through. The Ext4 file system includes journaling to stop some problems but not all. You might have to run a repair on the file system. if that does not work, a repair at the OS level. After that, you may have to reinstall. What do you have as a backup?

Do you have Linux on a bootable live USB stick?
What experience do you have with things like Disks, Gparted, and the command line?

[cecilieaux]

Hardware damage is unlikely from switching off. What can be damaged is the file system. Flash memory can fail to complete a write. Linux delays some writes up to a minute and changes to your system may have died half way through. The Ext4 file system includes journaling to stop some problems but not all. You might have to run a repair on the file system. if that does not work, a repair at the OS level. After that, you may have to reinstall. What do you have as a backup?

Do you have Linux on a bootable live USB stick?
What experience do you have with things like Disks, Gparted, and the command line?

I don't have Linux on a USB, I think I burned it on a CD or DVD. Disks? I'm not sure. Gparted I know, command line I can do but there are lots of commands I don't know.

Right now the one thing that is clearly not working is mintinstall. I mean, I can get it to work from the terminal, but not from the menu.

[AZgl1800]

First an assumption.

The VM you have running, did you install it from the Software Manager's repository?

If so, there is a bug in that version and it won't run under Cinnamon for me.

I had to delete that version with this command:


sudo apt remove --purge virtualbox*

When that was done, I installed VM 6.0.1 direct from Oracle

The VB from repo is outdated and won't run with the latest kernel as mine is (4.13.0-32). For solving this, you should uninstall it completely and download the latest version from https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads get the AMD64 version, not the i386 version.

Plus the corresponding Guest Additions from https://www.virtualbox.org/download/tes ... 120528.iso

that link is like this in English:
xxxxx.virtualbox.org/download/testcase/VBoxGuestAdditions_5.2.7-120528.iso

The forum will hide most of that link from you when it is converted into a hotspot.

Oh, this has to be done from within VM.... not from Linux. You just point VM direct to the Guest Addition ISO.
Make sure that the Guest Addition you load is 5.2.7 as the version 5.2.6 won't work.


Once that was all done, I was able to load VM and install a lot of stuff as you can see here.


.

VM apps loaded.png

[cecilieaux]

The VM you have running, did you install it from the Software Manager's repository?

If so, there is a bug in that version and it won't run under Cinnamon for me.
I had to delete that version with this command:

sudo apt remove --purge virtualbox*

When that was done, I installed VM 6.0.1 direct from Oracle

I did that using Synaptic. (I have yet to learn the apt commands.) The newer Vbox is really great!

Now, how about mintinstall (Software Manager). I can get it to run from Terminal, but not by clocking on the menu (the password box comes on, I enter the password and click ok ... then nuthin').

[cecilieaux]

.VM apps loaded.png

I also noticed your Irfanview. You can get XnView, an open source and free software very similar to Irfanview in Linux. Just sayin'

[cecilieaux]

Thank you for some of the advice, but I the following remains unanswered:

1. How can do I diagnose whether hardware is failing?

2. How can I test the overall damage to other apps?

Thank you in advance.

Cecilieaux