What can I learn from some problems after update?

[86ul]

Hello fellow users of Mint,

After an update of Mint 20.1 a few days back, I could not shut down my desktop. Instead of shutting down, it logged me off and that is it. When I tried to shut down my computer from there (right upper corner "Quit") I saw no options at all; just text in a small frame, no options. Then I logged back in, checked if any app was still processing some date, but nope, nothing was blocking a shut down. Then I tried to shut down it again, but I ended back on the log in screen, with no shut down options.

Because I preferred to shut down my desktop, I had basically two options: Either forcing shutdown through the terminal, which resulted in some messed up temp files (fe, Vivaldi Browser was misbehaving and deleting its temp files did the trick), or using the power switch to hard kill the desktop. I chose the latter, because otherwise I have to reset almost everything in Vivaldi.

Later that week I restarted my desktop and the disabled key ring was back active; from the app Passwords and Keys. I could not disabled it and there, so I had to restart the desktop again, in order to change the key ring password to nothing/disabling the key ring. Since I can only excess my sda, which is a NFTS disk and I use LuckyBackUp to clone my data to sda1.

Creating a directory in sda results in

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cannot create directory ‘test’: Read-only file system Mint 20

and ll/ls -l results in

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total 16
drwxrwxrwx   1 bbul bbul 4096 aug  1 14:18  ./
drwxr-x---+ 10 bbul bbul 4096 aug  7 12:33  ../
drwxrwxrwx   1 bbul bbul    0 jul 18 07:59 '$RECYCLE.BIN'/
drwxrwxrwx   1 bbul bbul 4096 jun 26 14:36  86ul/
drwxrwxrwx   1 bbul bbul 4096 jun 16 16:14 'System Volume Information'/
drwxrwxrwx   1 bbul bbul    0 jun 16 14:00  .Trash-1000/

In order to (re)get full acces of the sda, I had to repair sda with Disks: Disks > sda > Settings:Repair Filesystem.

Although I have succeded to get full acces of sda, I am still wondering if I could prevent this from happening again; because this is not the first time that I had to repair this specific sda disk. Looking back I see a pattern: 1) After updating some app (yet unknown) I can not shut down the desktop, because it just logs me off like above. 2) Then I use the kill switch, the disabled key ring is back active and I have this same problem with sda. So, what can I learn from this?

In another forum I have found the following, which seem to describe what has happend with my desktop/sda. Maybe it is something of help:

OK, as it said, the content of /etc/mtab may be not accurate because it can't be written to that file. So it seems to me that your entire /-partition is mounted read-only. This normally only happens when the system recognizes errors on that partition and re-mounts the partition read-only to prevent further damage.

Source: https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... em-892179/

[spamegg]

Can you show us your sudo cat /etc/fstab? Sometimes there can be errors=remount-ro option for some of the partitions there.

[86ul]

Thanks for your quick reply, and also sorry for my late reply.

As it did not reoccur after this post, I suppose it was not an issue anymore. Later I found some time to do an update to Mint 20.2.

Here are the requested result of sudo cat /etc/fstab in M20.2

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# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
# / was on /dev/nvme0n1p2 during installation
UUID=facb3a42-98ce-4cee-8578-703d2005bab3 /               ext4    errors=remount-ro 0       1
# /boot/efi was on /dev/nvme0n1p1 during installation
UUID=6CD4-3810  /boot/efi       vfat    umask=0077      0       1
/swapfile                                 none            swap    sw              0       0

[86ul]

Hum, it happend again, this time on M20.2.

The weirdest thing is, it happend to happen 15 minutes or so after TimeShift had created an image. Which I used to 'restore' my Mint, and after the restoring proces, I did not have any issue in shutting Mint down. So, what is causing this shutting down issue?

[spamegg]

One possible cause is this:

When the file system piles up many errors, because of the errors=remount-ro option your file system will be remounted as read only, which can cause all kinds of issues.

To fix file system errors one must run fsck on that partition.

For the last 6 months or so people have been reporting similar issues. They get a busybox prompt on boot telling them to run fsck manually, because their file system contains many errors. I believe there is a bug in the Ubuntu kernel causing this, because it happens even on brand new hard drives and fresh installs. It usually takes 2-3 days to occur. (This wasn't happening on the 4.15 series kernel.)

The only way to solve this issue permanently is to force fsck to run at every boot and fix the errors. We need to edit /etc/default/grub to do that.

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sudo xed /etc/default/grub

This will open the file. There is a line that looks like:

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash"

Edit this like:

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GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash fsck.mode=force fsck.repair=yes"

Save and close the file. Then run sudo update-grub and reboot. Keep using your system for 1-2 weeks to see if you have any problems. I've done this and I never have any issues anymore.

If you still have the same issues then I'm wrong and the issue is caused by something else.

If you want to see fsck "in action" you can press Esc during boot to show all the boot messages (this cancels the "quiet" option). If you see fsck fixing a bunch of errors then that's the most likely culprit.

[86ul]

Thanks for your reply. So, this is a stubborn bug in Kernel 5.x?

A few days back, I had again this problem of not shutting down. And just today again, so I went back to this forum for a solution. After creating an image by TimeShift, I have applied your suggestion. Fingers crossed.

EDIT: On the errors, when my dual boot systeem starts up Linux, I always see/saw a bunch of errors. I hope to catch these errors and post them here, just in case it will be of any help.

[86ul]

One possible cause is this:

When the file system piles up many errors, because of the errors=remount-ro option your file system will be remounted as read only, which can cause all kinds of issues.

To fix file system errors one must run fsck on that partition.

Although I have applied your fix as suggested, I still have this shut down issue. But he, now we can exclude this problem from the long list of possible reasons why my mint can not shut itself down from time to times.

[86ul]

EDIT: On the errors, when my dual boot systeem starts up Linux, I always see/saw a bunch of errors. I hope to catch these errors and post them here, just in case it will be of any help.

The errors that I have are the No irq handler for vector-errors (see attachment).

Is this of any help, or do I have another problem to solve?