Corrupted profile after initramfs

Support & Help Requests
1

Hi!

I've got Mate 22.04 installed on an HP laptop.

Lately, I've been having issues with /dev/sda6. Sometimes I get the initramfs error message during start-up. I've always been able to fix that by running fsck /dev/sda6 -y.

Yesterday, while being logged in, I was suddenly unable to save or open files, so I did a reboot, got the initramfs message, and ran the same solution as before.

But when I logged in to my profile, some of it was corrupted. My start menu was gone, my desktop image was gone, only a single launcher (Firefox) was left on the upper panel, and the theme is competely different. Moreover, keyboard shortcuts using ctrl are not available. That's especially painful in Libre Office, where I've previously used keyboard shortcuts a lot. Chrome behaves as if every launch is the first ever, and Brave launches with the same web page as I had open shortly before the crash.

On the other hand, the auto-launch programs still work, and I can't notice any changes in Firefox or Thunderbird.

How can I solve this issue?

Thankful for any help.

2

I would take a backup and replace /dev/sda.
You had issues in the past, hardware dies.

2 Likes
3

sda6 is 900G of a 1Tb disk, so that would basically mean replacing the whole hard drive. It would make more sense to just buy a new laptop, but I'm trying to avoid that, at least for now.

4

laptop model? usually you can replace the ssd or the nvme.

1 Like
5

It's an eight year old HP with a hdd.

6

The hdd is SATA that's why I asked for the model#. ssd 1TB is about $60.

1 Like
7

I would definitely look into replacing the HDD (or upgrading to SSD depending on socket), I don't think there'll be any other way around it.

1 Like
8

OK, thanks! I actually hadn't realized that an SSD is as cheap as pavlos_mairis suggests, so that may be the best solution.

9

I actually didn't realize that an SSD is as cheap as you suggest, so that may be the best solution. Thanks!