Arch Linux

farben.rausch

Member

Registered: 2011-10-25

Posts: 16

Need detective to spy into my Asus+Samsung-Hardware problem

Hey.
First of all, I guess I was able to locate the real problem outside of the OS (arch linux) but this is still somewhat strange and maybe connected. The Problem is as follows:
I use an ASUS UX32VD with Samsung 840 Pro SSD.
I am running arch linux on my devices since 7 years continuesly so I am somewhat aware of the mistakes that I make but also know how to look into problems - still, here I have no clue anymore!

1. The Beginning

It was of my Laptop for 6 weeks traveling Europe. When I came back, everything was smooth. 2nd day I pacman -Syu-ed and after the reboot after the upgrade my Laptop started to show the first strange behavior.

2. The Problem

When I was booting without power cable just into battery mode everything was fine. Even heavy load and applications using NVIDIA CUDA etc.
When I was booting on battery and plugged the power cable after login => reboot after several seconds, typically 5-10. Depending on (i guess) the power level of my battery, sometimes the pc would not reboot (if battery lower than 50%) and I would be happy.
When I was booting with power cable attached the Laptop rebooted 15 sec after login(!). Even without X or anything running on runlevel3. Login => reboot. There was no error message to find in the journals, the only thing that was sometimes shown was a line

---- (Reboot) ----  

3. The real problem

Ok, tried to research on the net, called it a hardware issue, thought it might be the battery, but it was so random. Another thing that appeared was that programs that use ncurses seemed to mess up my shell. I wasn't able to use programs like 'htop' or similar anymore, the lines would loose empty spaces an be hard to read. Also, I had a lot of processes running (by my user) that didn't have a name description (maybe related to the ncurses thingy) that were spawned always together with firefox. And, strangely, I had about 15-20 root processes running with strange name, sth like 'exbio' or 'bioex', I can't recall it really, but it was very strange and I only found one post on the net that was talking about it but without further information. Then I was asking ksysguard as root to show details of the process I got some access denied message. Even as root. I was panicking, someone might be in my system and I started to purge programs via pacman (starting with kde-plasma) to figure out if I can find anything strange by cleaning off the system to a rather 'fresh' install.
After some purging and an intermediate reboot I was not able to run the laptop stable anymore. It would shut down few seconds after booting the kernel, usually around the time when I arrived at the login prompt.
Then I opened the case, un- and replugged the battery and the SSD and made a cold boot. Strangely the SSD was not recognized by the bios anymore. Well. it is recognized when I check the SATA connections. Everything is there. But I have no boot option for it and can not create a new one, because the drive does not actually show up when I have to select a drive for the boot option.
The drive works super fine on other Laptops, and other drives work fine on my laptop. It is just that combination of my drive and my laptop that does not work anymore.

I am running kali now from an USB stick and the system shows no strange hardware behavior. battery is charging, no reboots, nada!
My drive is seen and can be decrypted and mounted as I could all the time, but still the bios doesn't see it anymore. I updated the firmware of the SSD and I updated the BIOS (to the same version as it was already, but just in case). Didn't help.

Additional Info

I installed wine and several Structure-From-Motion(SFM)-applications (some via aur) during the period of power problems.  With one of them there came a binary blob from a website that was recognized as untrustworthy by firefox. I still installed it, I know.
I have access to all the data from the drive, logs and everything. I might even be able to arch-chroot into it from an arch-stick (didn't try so far).
Edit: An additional SSD installed on the Mainboard with 24GB shows the exact same symptoms, recognized by the bios but not recognized as a hard drive.

I know that this is not really fixing a problem with arch linux. If you consider it OT, please move it there. But if you have any idea on how to figure out what is happening here, please help me!
(Getting a new drive and cloning the data wouldn't be a problem, but I want to figure out what is happening on my Laptop because I want to trust it - and at the moment I can not trust it.

cheers

Last edited by farben.rausch (2017-09-16 10:50:20)