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I've got a problem with my computer since a couple of days. I ran a fsck which gave a couple of problems with my filesystem (ext4). A day later my OS was no longer booting. Therefore I tried to reinstall Kubuntu 22.10 from USB Stick but it fails always at around 55% of the installation. It says that the checksum of e.g. libxul.so is failing. I looked with help of the life system into the device and saw that the filesystem was corrupt once I reached a fill level of the disk of about 6-8GB. Before everything was fine. This problem comes up even if I switch to a different device (I've used NVME1.4 WD Black 2TB, NVME1.2 Corsair MP600 1TB and an old HDD Samsung 1TB on SATA). Always the same problem. I changed also the USB sticks, always the same result. I tried even a BIOS update. My HW is a 3950x with an ASUS E-Gaming x570 and a GTX1660 with 64GB RAM.

Any suggestions if this is more a SW or a HW related problem?

Wolfgang Fischer
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  • You mention issues with an install & checksum; is that on the installation media? or the drive you're installing to? Have you performed SMART diagnostic checks on your drive(s)? (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools) Your description whilst incomplete; does read like hardware issues that you should be investigating (if it's not operator fixable issues such as ISO validation/media write where checks weren't performed) – guiverc Jan 30 '23 at 08:47
  • Possibly useful - https://askubuntu.com/questions/993407/is-verifying-isos-downloaded-from-the-official-website-worthwhile/993409#993409 but also read my Media Checks answer to as for the 'operator fixable issues I mentioned in prior comment; if you're not aware of what I was referring to. – guiverc Jan 30 '23 at 08:52
  • I've checked all the disk I've been using with smartmontools. There were no problems shown. Only the Corsair MP 600 showed that there was 1% spare sectors used. But no problems so far seen before. And, the problem is always on the drive's side, regardless which drive I'm using. For me it looks like that I can write up to around 6-8GB without problems and then I'm running into a filesystem problem, seems like there is some kind of overflow happening which then overwrites existing sectors and hence corrupts the filesystem. – Wolfgang Fischer Jan 30 '23 at 11:59

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It was a strange error pattern for me to encounter. When installing Kubuntu, a checksum error was displayed with several different nvme's or hdd's, so I assumed that the motherboard had a problem. I balked a bit at the rebuild, talked to a few more colleagues, and one said that this could also be a RAM problem. Since this was the easiest thing to do, I bought a new set of RAM bars, put them in and lo and behold, the error was gone. My explanation is that the data sent to the mass storage was altered by the defective RAM, so then the checksum error occurred.

Wolfgang Fischer
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  • FYI: If you switch to terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F4) during install you can login & look for clues.. Media usually show as squashfs errors (ie. reading the squashfs file-system of the installation media), but if there are RAM errors they should be easily detected in standard Linux system logs (even if the installer doesn't check for them & thus cannot provide a meaningful error message). Kubuntu's ubiquity I find pretty easy to find clues. Your installation media includes a RAM test function (though it doesn't show on all hardware due to licensing issues as I understand it) – guiverc Feb 10 '23 at 10:37