As of a few days ago I noticed my computer would at times lose its ability to connect to the Internet – often still indicating it was connected, just not actually connected in practice – and this was often accompanied by Firefox freezing, trouble shutting down, or failure to restart. The last time it happened, maybe an hour ago, I decided that the problem was severe enough to warrant me using Timeshift. And so I backed up all my files; tried looking up whether Timeshift was safe; and then bit the bullet and did the thing. But then Timeshift seemed to get stuck rebooting, so I looked up whether it was safe to do a hard shutdown, and it seemed to be, so I did it.
Tried to turn on my computer again and I was met with a screen reading “KERNEL PANIC! Please reboot your computer. VFS: Unable to mount root fs on unknown-block(0,0)”
Cursed a lot; messaged some friends about it but have only gotten read receipts and consolation; all I can think to do now is use my months-old live USB and just reinstall everything. Is there anything else I can do?
I’m just so pissed off about this, I swear.
Edit: I selected recovery mode from the bootloader and that fixed it. We are Back Baby!!
Edit 2: From what these comments are saying I guess things aren’t quite so straightforward. I have no-one to blame but myself. Saiaku.
Edit 3: Looks like it wasn’t the fact that I used recovery mode that let me start my computer like normally, but the fact that I chose the bottom option from the “advanced settings” list.
7·1 month agoDo you have a grub boot menu with options? If there is “Advanced options for Linux Mint” (or maybe it says Ubuntu?) you can try booting into a different kernel or recovery mode. If there isn’t I’m not sure what to do.
Very sorry for you that this is happening. As much as it is the “Year of the Linux desktop” it isn’t without problems.
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Tried that literally the instant before you posted this comment and it worked like a charm. Holy fuck thank God this didn’t end up being a whole ordeal.
Yeah, I searched up the error, and it might be that initramfs is missing.
I would love to tell you what the exact correct next step is but I’m not entirely sure. Maybe
dpkg --configure -a, maybe checking to make sure /boot isn’t full. But that’s if your system isn’t completely borked from the timeshift.
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“The exact correct next step”, you say? So this recovery mode thing isn’t a permanent fix?
“Recovery mode” is akin to Windows’s “Safe Mode,” (though exactly what it does depends on the distro). It will attempt to boot the OS with most non-essential features disabled (potentially including networking, graphics, and multi-user mode). It doesn’t do anything to automatically diagnose or repair problems. It’s more of a Hail Mary to get a (one) working terminal so you can diagnose and repair the problem yourself without needing to fetch another computer to flash a bootable USB.
Many distros also keep the previous 1-3 kernel versions around to try if the most recent one doesn’t boot. These options will usually be labeled “fallback” and have a lower version number. These options should boot normally (with full functionality), assuming there are no other problems, but the oldest one will be removed each time a new one is installed, so this is not a permanent solution either.
I’m not exactly sure what the root cause is here, but like others mentioned, non-specific random problems like this often indicate a hardware issue. Random delays in completely unrelated software like this can be triggered by disk IO blocking, which could be a hardware thing or (disk) memory exhaustion. Could also be filesystem corruption, though this is exceedingly rare with “modern” (of this millennium) journaling filesystems. Or it could be (RAM) memory exhaustion if you are using a swap partition - when there is not enough RAM, lower priority processes begin having their memory shuffled back and forth between RAM and the disk. This will effectively grind your system to a standstill as long as its ongoing, even with fast disks. If you don’t have swap enabled, the system will instead just kill arbitrary processes, which is bad, but at least it isn’t slow :)
VFS: Unable to mount root fstypically indicates a problem with the initramfs. There are a million different ways to configure the kernel, but what most modern distros do is ship a highly modular kernel. Instead of building thousands of drivers into a single kernel binary, they are stored on the disk as thousands of separate modules which can be loaded if / when needed. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem though. Like if you need the NVMe driver to read an NVMe disk, but the NVMe driver is stored on the NVMe. To work around this, an extra (normally invisible) boot-strapping step takes place. An initramfs image is created after installing a kernel containing a minimal bootable filesystem which includes the drivers and utilities which are essential to boot your system, and the bootloader loads it into memory along with the kernel. The kernel mounts the initramfs as root, begins to boot, and the early-init system will do what it needs to mount your real root filesystem and transfer control to your real PID 1 init process. If the initramfs image corresponding to the specific kernel you’re booting is missing (or damaged) from your boot directory, this will not function correctly. A lot of times problems can occur from an undersized ESP or boot partition filling up with old kernels. This should not impact performance at all if the system is booting normally, though, so it doesn’t answer original question.Thank you for the very in-depth and easy to follow explanation. My current plan is to keep booting into an older kernel until the next kernel update; hope that the update magically fixes everything; and if it doesn’t, boot into an older kernel and try checking whether boot is full and then regenerating initramfs; and if that doesn’t work, cry and do a fresh install.
You can probably select the recovery mode next boot too, and hope that some future update does the the necessary things that ends up fixing it. But besides that, I don’t think so.
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I guess I can live with it for the time being.
I decided that the problem was severe enough to warrant me using Timeshift. And so I backed up all my files; tried looking up whether Timeshift was safe
???
You should never do a system restore when the system is experiencing problems for unknown reasons. The purpose of a system restore is for reverting a system update when you know it causes problems. It does not even make sense for a Linux System to ship with such a tool, in my opinion. It’s more used for Windows or Mac because those systems are a proprietary blob. I can only think that the reason why Mint ships with such a software is to appeal to people who have Windows-brain.
Seriously what you did makes no sense and is the worst thing you could have done. You basically committed [redacted] on your computer
If you think a specific program such as firefox is malfunctioning because of a bad package install, you can reinstall a specific package with the package manager. ex. apt --reinstall install [package name]. This is something that general doesn’t happen but is usually caused by user error.
you are supposed to diagnose system problems by reading the system log and deciding what to do from there
systemd example; sudo journalctl -b 0 -p “warning”
the symptoms you are describing indicate that you are experiencing hardware failure and you need to do hardware diagnosis before continuing safely
You need to run memtest86 to determine whether your RAM is failing. The FOSS version, not the corporate/proprietary version. This is a tool that writes patterns over your RAM like hundreds of times and checks the patterns to see if the ram is operating correctly. Malfunctioning RAM would mess up your system in mysterious ways as your described. If memtest86 shows errors, you probably need new RAM.
You need to run smartctl (smart tool). SMART is a software that is built-in to the firmware of your harddrive or SDD. Whenever your harddrive experiences errors, it writes the errors to a log within the SMART utility. You need to use SMART tools to check the SMART log. The SMART log should say 0 errors, 0 bad sectors. If SMART says there are errors, you need a new harddrive or SSD.
both of these tools used to be on the linux mint usb. idk if they still are.
If both memtest86 and smartctl say that your hardware is healthy, then you continue.
The traditional way to fix ‘a system which does not boot’ is to use “chroot” from a bootable media such a usb stick. Basically the way this process works is that you boot a linux installer, you go to the command line, you mount all of your system partitions, and then you run chroot on your system partitions. chroot creates a virtual environment as if it were your system; it basically allows you to open a command line on your system without booting the system.
From the chroot command line, you would need to use the package manager to reinstall whatever packages are missing or broken.
Seeing as how the timeshift failed mid-process, your system seems to be in a very precarious state. It might be better to a do full reinstall.
When you reinstall the system, I recommend you use separate partitions for the root and /home directories. If your brick your system again, you can system overwrite the root partition, while keeping your /home (user directory partition).
I am aware from the fact that I frew up that I should not have eaten the fwog. I pwomise I will not eat fwogs again, pwobably. …Maybe. …Hopefully.
I’d really decided to do the system restore because I’d tried to look up potential causes of my troubles and decided that it was too much of a PITA to deal with properly, and since the problem had only started recently and wasn’t specific to any one program, I figured it was probably related to a faulty system update of some sort. Which is to say that God has punished me for my laziness and hubris by setting up this trap for me which could’ve been entirely avoided if I’d just dealt with the problem properly to begin with.
I see that you were able to boot the system. I still recommend that you do the hardware tests.
here’s how to check the health of your harddrive/ssd:
this might not work if you have a nvme drive
# install the fdisk and smart tools sudo apt install smartmontools # this will show a list of your devices sudo smartctl --scan # the previous command will tell you the filename of the device of your harddrive. it will either be like /dev/sda , --all means print all info about the drive sudo smartctl --all /dev/sdashould look like this
it tells you like how many times your harddrive has been turned on. zeros are generally good. if it says that there is some error greater than 0, that is maybe bad.
for example if “reallocated_sector_ct” is greater than 0, that is very bad. it means that you harddrive has had failing sectors.
there’s a list of which attributes means that your harddrive is dying on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring,_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology#In_ATA
here’s how to test the RAM
sudo apt install memtest86+then you have to reboot your computer and pick memtest86 on the boot options. it should take like 30 minutes or so to complete the test.
I have an NVME drive so the results I got looked a bit different. I saved them to a text document and sent it to my phone so I can try to figure out what to make of it. It says that it “passed” the overall health test, so I’m reckoning it’s probably not the problem. I’m running the memory test now.
Rebooting the computer brought me back to the kernel panic screen until I rebooted it again, but this is what I expected to happen and I can at least rest assured that things work for now if I boot into recovery mode.
Edit: After around 20 minutes a banner reading “pass” showed up. It seems like it just loops until I stop it.
Edit 2: Also, turns out that the computer boots normally even if I don’t use recovery mode, if I choose the lowest option in the advanced settings thingy in the bootloader. Choosing the top option I believe gave me the Kernel Panic screen, second from the top gave me a black screen that I could use that Ctrl+Alt+F1 shortcut on.
NixOS giving the option to revert to previous system configs is such a nice tool, its too bad that the barrier to entry for it is just a little too high for people who are new to Linux or I would suggest it for everyone.
Some kind of I/O crapping out can have these symptoms, programs just start freezing during I/O and then can’t be killed either. Then it also fails to restart because it cannot kill all the processes. This could be a buggy driver, it could also be your hardware, like RAM or SSD or network adapter (just a guess could be something else).
You should look at the kernel logs when you notice a problem, using
dmesg(needs root). This will probably tell you what I/O (hardware or driver) is borked. If the source of the error seems inconsistent or random, that indicates that RAM or CPU don’t work right, which could mean they’re kaput but could also be a power or cooling issue. You could also try to run various kinds of diagnostics off a USB, like memtest86.Idk how timeshift works, so no idea if it can be fixed, but if your hardware is broken it’s not a good idea to reinstall or fix stuff, that just makes it worse.
I really wish I’d taken a picture of the screen when the computer was failing to restart, because it was like a black screen that was slowly getting filled with text, much of which was like the same message about a driver? But that’s too vague to be helpful.
It really does seem like it could be anything. I’ve been experiencing some amount of weirdness ever since I switched to Linux, and my laptop is physically at this point a bit worse for wear.
Most gnu/linux systems use a thing called a package manager. The system software is broken up into packages and each package is signed by the developers. Mint either uses the ubuntu or debian repository depending on which one you installed.
I’m not sure if this is the best way of doing it, but there is a tool called debsums. It verifies the integrity of all the software binaries by comparing them to the packages.
https://manpages.debian.org/trixie/debsums/debsums.1.en.html
also if you ever experience a black screen on boot. you can press ‘ctrl + alt + f1’ on the keyboard to try to access a tty command line. pressing different fX keys will put you into different terminals.
I had these symptoms when (if I remember correctly) a hard drive failed. I never had an SSD fail but I think you can use
smartctlfromsmartmontoolsto check SSD health also. But again, could be anything, could be a kernel bug also.
