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Linux Mint Crash


raymac46

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My granddaughter's desktop system, which was running Linux Mint 22, suddenly started booting to a Busybox shell instead of the Cinnamon desktop. I took a look at it today and tried to restore an earlier Timeshift backup using a Live USB system.

After several failures, I just decided to nuke and repave, since the grandkids keep everything on Google Drive with their school system. Everything is fine now.

I later discovered I may have been able to recover the old system by using the Live USB and running fsck on the root partition.

Has anyone run into this problem with Mint or Debian?

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Sorry the grand-kids had this problem but glad all is now good.   Good thing they saved the important stuff to Google Drive.  I can't tell you the number of times I've had situations like this.  Eventually it gets sorted whether I fix it or I just start over... it is frustrating.

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securitybreach

I haven't ran into this exact issue as none of my machines use busybox but basically what happened was a corrupt filesystem.  Running fsck /dev/blah -f and choosing yes when prompted. That said, this is not a normal issue and probably indicated that the harddrive is dying. I would look into getting another harddrive for the machine.

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Most folks I install Linux for don't have problems, and if they do it's usually something I have never seen before. I have had issues with boot failure myself but it was usually when I botched an Fstab edit, or a video driver didn't get installed properly. I have automatic updates on their system, so that may have caused the issue. I have to set up auto-update because otherwise they never do it manually.

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There is an old HDD in the desktop which is mounted as a removable disk. It doesn't contain much of anything. Could this disk cause a corruption in the boot partition?

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securitybreach
5 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

The hard drive is a fairly new SSD so I hope that is not the problem.


Then it's doubtful that was the problem.  Perhaps they shut it down during an update to the kernel or something.

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securitybreach
2 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

There is an old HDD in the desktop which is mounted as a removable disk. It doesn't contain much of anything. Could this disk cause a corruption in the boot partition?

 

It could but unlikely.

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Hedon James

I find it more troublesome that a timeshift snapshot couldn't restore the system.  what's the point of a recovery that you can't recover?!  i hope you get it figured out because it's hard to have confidence in a setup if you aren't sure why it failed in the first place.

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I tried 4 or 5 different Timeshift backups and every one said "restored with errors" and would not boot to anything but the Busybox shell. I don't live with this machine and I don't know what the kids do with it on a daily basis. I used RSYNC as the method for Timeshift backups.

After nuking from orbit and a reinstall, the kids used it for 4-5 hours without incident.

Everyone at my daughter's house is computer savvy, but nobody is a real IT expert. In this case, the real Linux guru was unable to identify the root cause of the glitch anyway.

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securitybreach
19 minutes ago, raymac46 said:

I tried 4 or 5 different Timeshift backups and every one said "restored with errors" and would not boot to anything but the Busybox shell. I don't live with this machine and I don't know what the kids do with it on a daily basis. I used RSYNC as the method for Timeshift backups.

After nuking from orbit and a reinstall, the kids used it for 4-5 hours without incident.

Everyone at my daughter's house is computer savvy, but nobody is a real IT expert. In this case, the real Linux guru was unable to identify the root cause of the glitch anyway.

 

Good deal. I find it hard to believe that a somewhat newer ssd would be bad so its more than likely somehow corrupted.

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abarbarian
21 hours ago, Hedon James said:

I find it more troublesome that a timeshift snapshot couldn't restore the system.  what's the point of a recovery that you can't recover?!  i hope you get it figured out because it's hard to have confidence in a setup if you aren't sure why it failed in the first place.

 

That is one reason I stopped using Windows. Got a blue screen, try the backup feature, it only ever worked one out of ten times,total waste of time,only option ,reinstall with all that it entailed. Grrrr. 🤔

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Hedon James
2 hours ago, abarbarian said:

 

That is one reason I stopped using Windows. Got a blue screen, try the backup feature, it only ever worked one out of ten times,total waste of time,only option ,reinstall with all that it entailed. Grrrr. 🤔

just one?  I've got a list the length of my arm.  I had been looking to ditch Windows since Win8 arrived on the scene (actually, before then.....but Win8 forced the issue).  Looked into the Apple ecosystem, but it was "locked down" and once I realized they were charging $2,000+ for something I could've built myself with about $500-$700 of parts and a $29 operating system, they were blacklisted also.  That was about the time a friend mentioned "Linux".....didn't know what the heck he was talking about, but I went down that rabbit hole of "distros, RPM vs DEB, vi vs vim vs emac, Gnome vs KDE, Fedora vs Ubuntu vs Debian vs Mint vs Arch vs...."  Here I am about 15-17 years later....Linux for the win!

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abarbarian
19 hours ago, Hedon James said:

I've got a list the length of my arm. 

 

You must have really long arms 🤣

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securitybreach
1 hour ago, abarbarian said:

 

You must have really long arms 🤣

 

As someone in IT, my list would be blocks long...

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raymac46

I've never felt I need the training wheels a Mac system provides, although many friends and relatives swear by Mac. Windows has always worked OK for me, and the only disadvantages I have found are:

  • Cost.
  • Windows Updates can be problematic.
  • Eventually, they won't support perfectly good hardware.

I have always employed Linux as the savior of old systems, having used it on machines as old as 1995. Right now I have stuff from 2007 that still runs great.

And yes I have a Chromebook and Android phone.

 

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