Arch Linux

muz

Member

Registered: 2009-01-21

Posts: 17

recent stabilitiy issues hardware or soft?

Hello,

I have been running arch on my main laptop, a Vaio Pro 13, for multiple years now. I have recently started experiencing serious stability issues. I am trying to figure out if it is hardware failing or something to do with an update, but I don't know which way to look. I did not change anything other than the regular updates, as far as I am aware of.

My filesystem will die sporadically. If I have a terminal open, I can't even do a ls, (ls: command not found) if I don't have one I cannot open one, basically anything that is not already in the ram seizes to exist at this point. This is a 128 gb ssd with 30 gb space available. I am thinking, is this how ssds fail? I have disabled the SATA link power management, which has been enabled with no issues for more than a year now, to no avail.

I can't dmesg while this is happening (dmesg: command not found). Since the fs dies, I have no record of the event in the next boot, it works for a while and fails sporadically. I am backing everything up very often but I don't have an alternative computer and I don't want to buy a new ssd just to find out it was software.

How do I check for soft vs hard failure in this case? Any help debugging is appreciated.

Last edited by muz (2016-06-29 21:53:31)

Spider.007

Member

Registered: 2004-06-20

Posts: 1,175

Re: recent stabilitiy issues hardware or soft?

Have a look at smartctl to test your ssd for possible issues. Next thing I'd do is run `dmesg > /dev/vc/12` somewhere, so you can always have a look at the dmesg when this happens as it probably contains important clues

muz

Member

Registered: 2009-01-21

Posts: 17

Re: recent stabilitiy issues hardware or soft?

smartctl did not offer much help but dmesg -w showed that filesystem was switching to read-only. Cannot write to /var etc. I know this is how sd cards usually start failing so I went ahead and ordered a new ssd. Installed yesterday and worked so far without hiccups. So far so good.

I will be convinced once I see a couple days uptime, but thanks for the input.