It's believed that the main problems were i-node problems identified by
"fsck" during boot. The first time, they were on sda6; the second time, they
were on sda7.
A few follow-up questions about the hard drive... I used the long but non-destructive
test options of both "badblocks" and "smartctl". They each scan the
entire hard drive, right? If "dnf upgrade" were writing to new areas of the
disk, and those areas were bad,
1. those writes would have failed, and in turn have caused the "dnf upgrade" to
fail, right?
2. the "smartctl" and "badblocks" tests would have found and reported
those bad areas right?
I only have one system, and only one hard drive, and no money to buy.
The hardware work was done between fixing the second occurrence of the problem and the
upgrade from f24 to f25. That upgrade would have done a lot more disk writing (and
reading?) than did the two f24 weekly patches that preceded the boot failures. This
suggests - merely suggests - to me that the hardware work (re-doing cable connections,
cleaning, etc.) fixed the problem rather than it being a problem within the hard drive.
thanks,
Bill.