System crashes with "Input/Output Error"

[keat]

Hello everyone. Starting yesterday, my system has started crashing about 30 minutes after launch. All programs suddenly stop functioning properly, and running any command in the terminal gives cannot access <command>: Input/output error and slowly everything crashes until it’s just my background and my cursor. journalctl and dmesg don’t show anything wrong, and TTYs don’t work, forcing me to hard reboot.

At first I thought it was an issue with my SSD, but fsck says the partition is clean, and SMART test says the drive is healthy. I also did a memtest86 which passed with no errors.

Anyone have any ideas on what could be wrong and how to fix it? Let me know if there’s any further information I can provide.

[BluishHumility]

It could be an issue with your filesystem, as opposed to an issue with your disk. Also, some hard disks do not report SMART status accurately.

fsck should report filesystem errors, although I’m not sure if it actually does anything if you use Btrfs. What filesystem is in use?

This person put together what appears to be a rather exhaustive method for testing for disk or filesystem issues if you want to take a look:

Got "input output error" when execute any commands

[keat]

I’m using ext4, not btrfs (although it sounds like I should be using it!) I followed the instructions in that post, and the dd command thankfully didn’t give any errors at all so it likely is indeed a filesystem error.

Running fsck -r on my endeavourOS partition printed “clean” without any useful info, and didn’t seem to fix the problem. However, adding fsck.mode=force to my kernel parameters seems to have fixed the problem, I haven’t had a system crash all evening. It doesn’t make much sense to me, as the the Arch wiki entry for fsck seems to suggest that Arch automatically checks and fixes filesystem errors on boot anyway.

Regardless, it seems to be working now! If my system doesn’t crash again by tomorrow, I’ll mark this as solved. Thanks for your help!