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I'm running 18.04 with kernel 4.15.0-36-generic on a Lenovo thinkpad carbon x1 4th generation and I've been having some very persistent and annoying crashes. They occur pretty reliably when I suspend the laptop, but occasionally even when I haven't.

They start with either the wifi going out or elements of the UI disappearing. The terminal also responds to all commands with "command not found." Gradually all of the UI elements disappear, then the GUI disappears entirely to be replaced by what appears to be a log file of some kind continually updating.

Any ideas? I haven't been able to find anyone out there that was having precisely the same problem as I have. This thread seemed close, but I'm already on a version of the kernel where the problem is supposedly fixed. In the interests of full disclosure, I'm dual booting with Windows 10 and I initially updated to 18.04 from (IIRC) 16.10 to fix a similar problem but its only gotten worse. I just did a fresh install of both OS's and the problem persisted.

Thanks!

danish
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  • Should we assume the problem doesn't occur with Windows? If it does then it has nothing to do with Ubuntu. –  Oct 18 '18 at 18:20
  • Yes, sorry, I should have specified. This is only a problem with the Ubuntu install. – danish Oct 18 '18 at 18:21

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I think I fixed it, so I figured I should post the answer here in case some poor soul comes by with a similar issue. As it turns out the problem did extend to the windows boot, it was just rare and I spend much less time in that boot so I had not observed it at time of writing. The other clues were that I would occasionally get the error

Detection error on SSD (M.2)

from the firmware while trying to boot and I finally read the error log that ubuntu would dump to the screen when it crashed to find that it was all complaints about failures to read/write on the drive. Some googling suggested that the drives sometimes come loose or get dirty connections on this model of laptop, so I opened it up, took out the SSD, hit it with some canned air and put it back taking care to seat it securely. Seems to have worked. I think the canned air was probably superfluous but hey, I had it.

danish
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