Why did my Linux Mint system crash?

[Brian Cluff]

Perhaps your hard drive is dying and since you were running Linux, at 
the time, thats where the damage occurred.  Or something happened 
software wise the cause file system corruption.

If boot disks or other hard drives are working, you could try booting 
into one of those and then mounting your root file system, chrooting to 
the mount and then reloading everything that is complaining on boot.
I usually find I have to do the following mounts to get packages to 
install correctly in a chroot environment.

mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
mount --bind /proc /mnt/proc
mount --bind /dev /mnt/dev
mount --bind /sys /mnt/sys

cd /mnt
chroot .

Of course you will need to mount any extra partitions you might have 
your drive sliced into. The above assumes everything is on one big 
partition.

If your hard drive is dying, this won't do you any good, or at best, 
will just buy you a little time before a catastrophic failure takes 
everything with it.

Brian Cluff

On 01/14/2014 03:40 PM, joe at actionline.com wrote:
> The mem test ran about an hour and a half and found no problems.
>
> The box was set up as a dual boot with win7 (which I had never used), so
> I tried it and it worked. So I tried my Linux Mint 13 Live CD from which
> this system was originally installed and it works fine in all respects as
> far as I can tell. (I'm writing this note via webmail using the Mint 13
> Live CD.
>
> So, it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem. I had made no recent
> changes so how could Mint have become messed up?  And how can I repair
> it?
>
>
> --------------
> Michael Butash wrote (in part):
>> Just let it run a cycle on it ...
>> I'd say maybe a few hours on 8-16gb to run all patterns.
>
> ---------------
>> On 01/14/2014 01:38 PM, joe wrote:
>>> I'm running memtest86 now.
>>> How long should this run?  Now running about an hour ...
>
> ---------------
> Matt Graham wrote (in part):
>>>> ... there might be a hardware problem somewhere in this machine.
>>>>
>>>> You can attempt to diagnose the problem by booting from a rescue
>>>> system. If those things fail in a similar manner, it's almost
>>>> certainly a hardware problem.
>>>> (If the rescue system works fine, then your Mint
>>>> install is borked, but that seems sort of unlikely.)
>
>
>
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