Score:0

Broken inodes on Ubuntu 18.04 due to software bug or degrading hardware?

in flag

Since a week or so I encounter spontaneous errors like system freeze of the desktop or the system only boots into recovery mode and complains about broken inodes. Once my root-partition was even mounted read-only because of these errors. This appears to me that my SDD is degrading though all SMART parameters are fine. The SSD in this Fujitsu laptop is 8 years old so I think it is natural that it reached its EOL.

The strange thing is, that my other Laptop (2 years old Dell) now experiences the same issues today. The only thing both laptops have in common is that have Ubuntu 18.04 installed. So I suspect it's erroneous software which breaks my filesystem. If its a software error other Ubuntu 18.04 users should complain about it, too, but I couldn't find anything in the internet. So if it's not a hardware bug what could cause broken inodes?

TL;DR I have two different laptops of different age (8 and 2 years), but both show the same broken inode errors recently so I suspect it's a software bug (as both run Ubuntu 18.04), not a broken/degraded SSD. So if it's not a hardware bug what could cause broken inodes?

heynnema avatar
ru flag
Is this a dual-boot with Windows? Have you run `fsck`?
user535733 avatar
cn flag
You're right that other folks would complain. The fact that you couldn't find many hundreds of thousands of complaints burning down the internet about their data loss and broken production servers suggests that most folks find Ubuntu 18.04 to be reliable.
Score:0
in flag

Filesystem errors can be caused by dying hardware or by not shutting the system down correctly.

If your system is freezing and you are powering it off, this is the likely cause of your filesystem errors. Try pressing the power button briefly after a freeze and wait 30 seconds and see if the system shuts down by itself instead of doing a hard shutdown.

The real issue (which you didn't ask about in this question) is the freeze. You need to determine why it is freezing, and how to recover, or at least gracefully shutdown after a freeze.

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