this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023

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Something is seriously wrong with my desktop. (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I am pretty sure I pissed of some eldritch deity because I have been chasing this laggy feeling I had with my pc for 2 months.

But in the past few days my desktop was getting very slow during installationand general use. At the same time my HDD activity indicator would be on all the time. Turning off the pc would shut it down and a few seconds later restart.

So I switched out Fedora for Pop OS and everything went fine for half a day and the problemen came back again.

When turning off the pc, right now, I got what you see in the picture.

So I would like to ask do I need to hire an exorcist or is hardware borked in someway?

Any help would be greatly appreciatie, so I would like to thank anyone even willing to look at my post.

EDIT: Well for anyone still interested, apparently it was something in the 6.5 series kernals that made my pc behave weird because with 6.6 kernal all of the problems vanished. I want to thank everyone again for all the suggestion and help diagnosing my problem.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Looks like failing storage. You may be able to initiate a SMART self-test from the BIOS, or you can use the manufacturers tools. Seatools works on non-seagate drives and has a live USB option.

Do the short test first, if it passes, do the long one to confirm. Short test takes about 15 minutes usually, the long one can take a couple of hours.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I doubt this is storage. It looks more like some platform kernel or firmware bug. Another poster mentioned that it didn't happen on their machine until after an apt update so there's more indication.

While a SMART drive test never hurts I think this one is something else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

They switched distros and still had issues. That and the general slowdown with high disk usage is a classic sign of failing drives.

Chasing hardware issues by playing with software only wastes time, so ruling out the hardware first is a good idea

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

These are the results of the smart test I couleur complete.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Thank you so much for your fast response. I can't find any bios option for testing so I will have to do it with external software. Should I only test the boot drive or also the storage drive?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I would probably test both, just to be sure, but I wouldn’t bother with the long test on anything but the system drive unless you suspect a problem with it. The quick test is usually sufficient at catching most issues.

Since you’re looking at data corruption that persists between installs, your boot drive and memory are the most likely culprits. If the test says the drive is fine, then memory tests are next.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I do not know if this aides with diagnosis while I try to get the bootable usb to work (my pc doesn't recognise the program when I boot from the usb). But in bios my ram is detected 32gb but in the os it is detected as 31.19gb.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

First the delta in reported storage is normal. Drives are sold in multiples of "1000" but computers work in multiples of "1024". This is why a 32gb drive shows as a little bit less than that. Second the basic start up and config on the motherboard has an old way "BIOS" and a new way "UEFI". You need to make sure your motherboard knows how to talk to the config on the USB. Safe bet is to use "BIOS" as most newer systems will understand the old and the new way. You may have tell the bios to allow booting bios/legacy .

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Sorry if it was not clear, I was talking about my ram. I have 32gb of ddr3 ram that shows slightly more than 32gb in UEFI and 31.19gb in the os.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The exact same thing kept happening with Pop OS on my Thinkpad P50.

Install and reboot go fine, run the first apt upgrade and it nukes everything, leading to this error.

Wish I could be of help but I abandoned Pop OS and just installed Debian with the proprietary Nvidia drivers.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Thank you for your response, I doubt my case can be solved by plain Debian since the same problemen happend under Fedora and Pop OS. The only difference was that I got this error message with Pop OS.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

I found something suspicious, with a ridiculous amount of logs.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

I used Gsmartcontrol to do a smart test but both my storage devices got through them with no errors, but I can't get Seatools or Memtest to work on an bootable usb so I am kind of limited in what I can test right now.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Did you update the BIOS yet?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Thank you for your time, yes I have updated my Z97-DS3H to the F7 uefi/bios. The last one that was ever released.