My nemesis is a desktop with 12.04 64bit, installed a few months ago on a new (refurb) crucial 64gb v4 SSD, with a 120GB spinning disk for data. SSD has OS on 16gb ext4 partition, 8gb swap partition (for 4gb ram), 40gb ext4 mounted at /home, big disk mounted at /data. This is a family computer that basically sees 95% of its use in Firefox or Chromium, the remaining 5% is LibreOffice, Shotwell and Brasero.
About the SSD: I originally bought a new Crucial v4, and twice now I have had to return under warrantee, both times I got a refurb back. The refurbs both had a stamp saying they had the latest firmware. All three times, the very first thing I did after 12.04 install was to enable TRIM on both ext4 partitions on the SSD (/, /home).
About a month ago, I noticed that update manager had the red circle/white bar icon. Then when I tried to invoke software center, nothing (icon flashed, no window); I tried to install stuff with apt-get, there were errors, something to do with dpkg. Time went by, I tried software-center from command line, there were errors. Last night I finally took some time to try to research and fix; software-center from command-line was reporting python import problems with first line of /usr/bin/software-center (from gi.repository import Gtk, GObject). (Note, I've never dealt with Python, I'm a perl guy, but this seems pretty fundamentally broken, like in Perl if you couldn't "use File::Copy;" or something). Trying to install packages (gnome-hearts fer da kids) resulted in dpkg-related errors (I think maybe also python import problems)
I searched ubuntuforums, couldn't find this exact problem, but in everything similar people were asking for output from "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade", so I did that. update seemed to work ok, it mentioned 51 somethings, upgrade took probably an hour, apparently downloading the 51 somethings, and then installing. When it was done there were some errors, I don't remember what they were. I did update and upgrade again, still errors. I REBOOTED -- or tried to; and now I'm dead in the water.
Booting up I see the Ubuntu+white-->red dots, I see a page or so of text flashing by, and eventually get to an infinite loop where I see flashing on the top of the screen the two lines:
Could not write bytes - broken pipe [OK]
*checking battery state
This infinite loop is EXACTLY the death point I got to a few months ago (I still have it written down on the pad next to the computer) which required me to warantee the SSD (the second time), so I am super pissed (and afraid the only advice I'll get is "replace the disk and reinstall again").
I'm running off of Live CD now; disk utility says the SSD is healthy and "Check Filesystem" instantly returns "File system is clean" for both ext4 partitions. Is there any way I can diagnose/repair from this state? Or is my only recourse to reinstall 12.04 yet again (only to find out in a few weeks that the disk is toast anyways)?
Am I doing something wrong? Should I just give up on warrantee replacements and go back to spinning disks?
About the SSD: I originally bought a new Crucial v4, and twice now I have had to return under warrantee, both times I got a refurb back. The refurbs both had a stamp saying they had the latest firmware. All three times, the very first thing I did after 12.04 install was to enable TRIM on both ext4 partitions on the SSD (/, /home).
About a month ago, I noticed that update manager had the red circle/white bar icon. Then when I tried to invoke software center, nothing (icon flashed, no window); I tried to install stuff with apt-get, there were errors, something to do with dpkg. Time went by, I tried software-center from command line, there were errors. Last night I finally took some time to try to research and fix; software-center from command-line was reporting python import problems with first line of /usr/bin/software-center (from gi.repository import Gtk, GObject). (Note, I've never dealt with Python, I'm a perl guy, but this seems pretty fundamentally broken, like in Perl if you couldn't "use File::Copy;" or something). Trying to install packages (gnome-hearts fer da kids) resulted in dpkg-related errors (I think maybe also python import problems)
I searched ubuntuforums, couldn't find this exact problem, but in everything similar people were asking for output from "sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade", so I did that. update seemed to work ok, it mentioned 51 somethings, upgrade took probably an hour, apparently downloading the 51 somethings, and then installing. When it was done there were some errors, I don't remember what they were. I did update and upgrade again, still errors. I REBOOTED -- or tried to; and now I'm dead in the water.
Booting up I see the Ubuntu+white-->red dots, I see a page or so of text flashing by, and eventually get to an infinite loop where I see flashing on the top of the screen the two lines:
Could not write bytes - broken pipe [OK]
*checking battery state
This infinite loop is EXACTLY the death point I got to a few months ago (I still have it written down on the pad next to the computer) which required me to warantee the SSD (the second time), so I am super pissed (and afraid the only advice I'll get is "replace the disk and reinstall again").
I'm running off of Live CD now; disk utility says the SSD is healthy and "Check Filesystem" instantly returns "File system is clean" for both ext4 partitions. Is there any way I can diagnose/repair from this state? Or is my only recourse to reinstall 12.04 yet again (only to find out in a few weeks that the disk is toast anyways)?
Am I doing something wrong? Should I just give up on warrantee replacements and go back to spinning disks?