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I was watching movie on Amazon Prime and suddenly screen started stuttering. Not only that, it also does that on other video streaming websites. The video goes into a loop and nothing works. It does not shutdown, so i have to restart manually. Then on reboot, I get the initramfs error. I am talking about this error.

I found the solution here.

So my question is:-

  1. What is the root cause of this error as I got it twice in a day.
  2. Is there something wrong with my hard-drive or with the processor?
  3. How to prevent this error?
Master_Nachi
  • 350
  • Probably a bad disk. You should check if there are IO errors on the disk (in /var/log/syslog). If that is the case, you should consider replacing the disk. And make sure that you have a full backup if the disk breaks totally. – Soren A Mar 17 '21 at 09:41
  • Seems like your disk has problems. (It may even be serious.) Make it your priority to get a secondary device onto which you can back up your documents, movies, and all your files in general. Let it be anonther computer connected via a local network, an external hard disk, or a large enough capacity USB stick. To minimize the chance things getting into a worse state, don't use the computer for any other purpose until you are done with copying your files out. Use an Ubuntu live installer USB in "Try Ubuntu without installing" mode, if necessary. (It will be necessary for running fsck anyways.) – Levente Mar 17 '21 at 09:46

1 Answers1

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A bad disk probably.

(where it lists sda replace it for your device: see fdisk -l for instance)

After you get to a working system or from a live session do a ...

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install smartmontools
sudo smartctl -c /dev/sda

to install smartmontools and let it show how long a test is going to take and then do a

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda

to show any problems.

This can be used to create a list of badblocks:

sudo badblocks -v /dev/sda > badblocks.txt && more badblocks.txt

The more the worse the state of the disk.

The more issues the better it is to replace it.

Rinzwind
  • 299,756
  • Thanks for reply. I scanned almost half of the blocks and badblocks file is empty. It happened again but this time nothing was moving except mouse. It occurs only when I watch some videos on Ubuntu. I watched videos for 2 hours straight on windows 7 (dual boot) and not a single lag was there. I also noticed that hard-drive temperature remained at 45 degrees during scan. Is it too much for a hard-drive? – Master_Nachi Mar 17 '21 at 17:54
  • Install gsmartcontrol (sudo apt update && sudo apt install gsmartcontrol) to have a GUI interface to smartmontools. – Gabriel Staples Nov 27 '21 at 18:11