I have connected my Desktop PC to my LED TV. I stream everything from news to music.
From roughly 3 days I am facing occasional/complete freezes.
The Youtube video that I am watching stops & at the same time the HDD activity light on the
front panel keeps glowing.
Note: If I wait for a few minutes the freeze goes away & I regain control again.
Just 5 minutes back I faced another freeze. This time the HDD activity light did not glow & I was not able to regain control. I had to hard reset the PC.
Can you please tell me how to troubleshoot this issue ?
I am really enjoying the bleeding edge nature of EndeavourOS/Arch. I don’t want to go back to Debian for this problem.
No idea, you have to provide a bit more info. There could be a million possible reasons for this problem. You didn’t even mention what DE you’re running.
Are you using an Nvidia card? Do you have proprietary drivers installed?
What happened roughly 3 days ago that might have caused this?
You’ll have to provide a bit more info if you want help. Start by posting logs and hardware info (inxi -Fxxxza).
Try not to do that, this can cause corruption of the filesystem and data loss. You should consider enabling Magic SysRq button to safely reset your computer in case it freezes.
I am not using an Nvidia card. Using onboard Intel graphics.
From the day I have started using EndeavourOS I have installed updates multiple times per day. So its difficult to pin point what happened 3 days ago.
Output of inxi -Fxxxza is here
After the last hard reset that I did the 2nd (spinning) HDD that I am using became read only.
The boot process became extremely slow and it displayed a message saying something about
"dependency failed checking /dev/sda…Please provide root password for system maintenance " .
After that happened I booted from a Lubuntu 18.04 live CD, launched Gparted and did a filesystem check. After that EndeavourOS booted normally.
I will post logs in my next post.
Do you think a HDD failure can be the cause for the freezes that I am facing ?
I just finished backing all the important data that is on that drive. I will leave it connected for now but in case I face another freeze I will disconnect it.
The issue seems to be a hardware failure, so pahis probably won’t reveal anything useful.
@arch_lover, yes, try disconnecting the drive and see whether there are any freezes. Also, enable Magic SysRq button (look at my post above), just so you don’t have to hard reset your computer, which is always risky.
EDIT:
And it’s a Seagate Barracuda, of course! I had 3 of these failing on me, one within warranty, always with complete data loss (good thing I had backups of important files), before I vowed never to buy a Seagate HDD again. My advice: get a WD HDD (but not WD Green, those are rubbish). WD Blue are very cheap and very reliable, WD Black and WD Gold are fast and work great, super reliable. I have a dozen WD drives, some close to 20 years old, and they usually get obsolete due to small capacity, before they malfunction.
@Kresimir@keybreak
I really don’t need that much storage. The only reason I am using the second Seagate hdd is coz it belonged to my old PC. I will just disconnect it & throw it away.
Before you throw it away, open it and salvage the two super strong neodymium magnets from it. They are pretty awesome to have around (don’t put them near any credit cards and be careful they don’t pinch your fingers).
Also, use your computer for a few days without the drive in it, to make sure it was the cause of the freezes.
My PC again refused to boot. during boot it said “You are in emergency mode”.
I then removed the problematic HDD and deleted its entry from /etc/fstab.
Everything is smooth now. Thank God I was able to backup the data.
