Works fine until it doesn't on an Asus T100TA

[loudpa]

I installed SpiralLinux onto my old Asus T100TA and to my surprisement out of the box it work! I didn't even mess with replacing bootia32.efi.

But now I'm faced with an issue that I'm trying to understand. Keep in mind I am not a Linux expert by any means.
I can boot the laptop several times over the course of a couple of days, suspend it and all is just fine.
Then bam! It wont boot after GRUB menu, appears to simply shut down.

If I boot in recovery mode it states: Kernel panic Unable to mount root filesystem on /dev/...

I used snapperGUI and booted into SpiralLinux, did a snapper-rollback x, and the system is back.

This has occurred several times and I'm trying to understand why?
Perhaps simply to weak and old of a device, something running every once in awhile which damages the file system, other?

[geckolinux]

Hi there, the next time it fails to boot please post a photo of the error messages.

And then after the next successful boot you can get a readout of the logs from the previous boot with:
sudo journalctl --boot -1 --no-pager

My guess is that your hard drive is failing or you have bad RAM that is causing it to write bad data to the filesystem. The Btrfs filesystem automatically detects conditions that could silently corrupt data on the disk, and to prevent that from happening it refuses to "mount" (i.e. doesn't allow the filesystem to be used) until some manual restore work has been done.

[loudpa]

In addition, when it fails to boot you asked for a screen shot. Well what happens is the boot menu appears and then it start to boot but never displays the Loading RAM disk message and just dies, blank screen.
Now the camera light is always on (Linux thing?) during a successful boot it remains on all the time, but during failure to load it turns off after it tries to boot. So there is nothing screen wise to capture.

[geckolinux]

OK, thanks, so instead of trying to debug it would probably be faster to try reinstalling with XFS or EXT4, and please report back how that works.

[loudpa]

Well please let me ask and comment.
If I stick with btrfs it is very convenient for recovery. Simply boot into snapper, issue snapper-rollback.
If I go with XFS or EXT4 I lose that capability correct?
Using XFS or EXT4 I would have to use say TimeShift, right? that means boot using USB, and recover somehow as I have never done that before.

Also corruption, can I assume it is occurring in the FAT partition? I ask as what does snapper restore which corrects my issue. If so it is restoring my FAT boot partition and thus not touching the main (lack of a better term) btrfs partition.

PS: I tried to install TimeShift and it failed on an error can I assume this is because of btrfs?

[geckolinux]

Hi there, with Debian Stable there will be no breaking system updates that require system rollbacks, so XFS or EXT4 will be fine for your usage scenario.

Also corruption, can I assume it is occurring in the FAT partition?

The EFI partition on /boot/efi/ is a FAT32 filesystem that does not get snapshotted or rolled back, and the Btrfs root filesystem has no knowledge about it. There very well could be silent corruption happening there, but there is no self-aware mechanism for detecting and reporting that in FAT32. You could try using the Disks tool to access the SMART checks that the hard disk can run on itself to see if its dying, although positive SMART results don't necessarily guarantee a healthy disk.

PS: I tried to install TimeShift and it failed on an error can I assume this is because of btrfs?

TimeShift does not work with the specific Btrfs subvolume layout that Snapper requires.

It's important to distinguish between 1) the Linux operating system and 2) your personal files that are stored in /home/username/ .

• For 1), with easy and stable Linux offerings like SpiralLinux that are unlikely to receive defective package updates, the installation is so quick and easy that there's usually no point in trying to create images of the root filesystem for the purpose of restoring them. If you ever make manual changes that seriously break the system then it's usually much easier and faster to just reinstall the OS from scratch; just maybe keep a backup of any custom settings in /etc/ and always have good backups of your files and settings in /home/ .
• For 2), since user data is irreplaceable you should always have backups on separate media and/or locations of any personal data and settings that you care about. And remember that filesystem-level snapshots on Btrfs such as what Snapper and TimeShift create are not a substitute for backups, because if your hardware fails or your /home/ filesystem suffers a serious error then all of your snapshots will be lost with it.

[loudpa]

Thank you for the information, since this device is not my main device I'll try the EXT4 file system route soon and report back.

[loudpa]

Hoping this doesn't jinks me but after about a week of use sticking with btrfs I have not had any issues booting. Previous I had about 3-4 failures.
Not sure why everything is work fine but I'll take it.
This distro works great on this old under powered Asus t100 for simply web browsing.