On Tue, 2017-05-30 at 02:42 +0000, William Mattison wrote:
The fix on Thursday, May 18 did not last. This past Thursday, my
workstation again failed to boot. This time, it dropped me into an
emergency shell, not the dracut shell. This time, the log file was
almost twice as long. But it reported fsck failures again, this time
on sda7 rather than sda6. So I tried what my friend did, but with
"/dev/sda7" instead of "/dev/sda6" as the command parameter. I
spent
30-45 minutes doing nothing but rapidly hitting the 'y' key before the
command finally completed. (Apparently, hundreds of i-nodes were
corrupted this time.) Then the workstation successfully booted.
I think I spent a week trying to get into BIOS. But I wasn't seeing a
BIOS screen before the grub menu showed up. I think it was when I
shut down and started up a different way that I finally saw the BIOS
screen. I quickly changed the time for the BIOS screen from 2 seconds
to 8 seconds. As suggested in this discussion, I checked the voltages
and the clock. The voltages looked fine. The clock was about 5
seconds slow compared to my "atomic" clock. I adjusted that. This
morning, the clock seemed barely noticeably slow compared to that
atomic clock, but by less than a second. So I'm agreeing with your
suspicions that the battery is getting low.
Actually, I wouldn't call the BIOS clock being 5 seconds off much to
worry about (with regards to the battery). They're not that
particularly accurate, to begin with, on a par with a cheap wristwatch.
However, if your battery is a few years old, you may as well replace it
now that you're in the mood to do so. They do have a finite lifespan.
If the BIOS voltage monitors say the voltages are fine, they probably
are. Though they're not always super accurate, either. Software that
lets you read these values when the OS is running needs to modify them
with correction factors.
Since you talk about many file system errors, and difficulty booting,
I'm inclined to point the finger at the main power supply. If it's not
up to the task of powering everything, or is randomly glitching, that
could cause all sorts of instabilities.
Though, as you're taking things apart. It may well be a good idea to
unplug everything, and reconnect, just to exercise the connections
(cars, RAM, cables, etc). Cards have a habit of walking out due to
thermal changes, or mechanical stress when moving a flimsy case around.
Clean any exposed slots (e.g. unused PCIe slots).
I just did this simple search, and there's even videos of how to change
the battery, right at the top. Though I don't think much of one
person's crude "cut through the cover" technique.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ASUS+Sabertooth+Z77+bios+battery
This seems more sensible:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSTTR_WVtx0
long video, but he's done it by 4 minutes in.
Perhaps ASUS thinks that by the time the battery is crapping out, you'll
have reached the stage of wanting to buy a newer PC.
--
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64
(always current details of the computer that I'm writing this email on)
Boilerplate: All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.
The weekly life-cycle of the electronics enthusiast: Monday: Get an
idea, and draft it out. Tuesday: Go and buy the parts. Wednesday: Solder
the components together. Thursday: Build the casing and install the
electronics. Friday: Start getting it to work and fine tuning. Saturday:
Neatly install the finished product and use it for an hour. Sunday:
Watch smoke escape when you turn it on, prepare shopping list for new
parts to buy, tomorrow.