I'm having a confusing issue with my SSD. I will describe some of the symptoms.
- Randomly the GUI will crash. The launcher and panel disappear, programs won't launch and eventually everything blanks out.
- I can switch to another TTY, but when I try to log in I get the message
I/O error, dev sda, sector [some sector number]
- I then have to force reboot my machine at which point the BIOS fails to recognize my disk and leaves me at a blank command prompt.
- The first time this happened, I thought my drive was dead, but it turns out if I just shut down my machine and start it back up, the drive appears again and I can boot into Ubuntu.
It seems like everything points to a failing drive. BUT besides this issue I can't find any evidence of this.
- All the SMART tests are positive.
- I've run
e2fsck
on both partitions and it seemed to be fine. - I rad
badblocks
to check for bad sectors and nothing was found. - I've checked
dmesg
after an incident and nothing jumps out. - Most importantly, this issue is reproducible. As long as I force shut down, then bring the machine back up, everything is fine for an hour or so. If I reset the machine, the BIOS can't load the drive. I've done this probably 10 times now and the results are always the same.
I just don't know what else to check now. I'm fine with getting a new drive if I need to, but since I can't actually prove that it's broken, I don't want to replace it unnecessarily.
Basically, can anyone recommend any other tests or debugging steps to prove one way or another the state of my disk?
At Tom Brossman's suggestion, I tried switching the SATA port used by the drive. This had no effect. I also changed SATA cables which didn't work either.
Here's the output of `badblocks -v'
Drive information
SMART status