Allegedly, on or about 09 June 2017, William Mattison sent:
> * Hard drive?  Somewhat unlikely.  Two 4-hour non-destructive disk
> checks found no issues.  System cleaned; cables dis- and re-connected;
> hard drive removed and put back in; no kinky cables seen.  Destructive
> testing and replacing the hard drive are not options for me at this
> time.  Circumstances suggest such would be over-kill.

Still possible.  The unrecoverable errors may be on some part of the
drive that you're not reading files from, they may not.  Those errors
could have been caused by the drive (surface faults, firmware faults),
or external factors (fixed by reseating a cable, caused by some random
glitch that hasn't happened again, etc).

> * Somehow caused by the "dnf upgrade"?

I'd be surprised if a changed version of some software caused that kind
of error.  Not surprised if the action of writing data (any file, no
matter what it was) to a new areas of a drive could find a previously
undetected fault.

In the past, we used to format and check drives before installing, to
discover these little nasties.  These days, mostly thanks to drives
being huge and checks taking forever, the checking step gets omitted
(it's no longer an option in the installer).

> * Power supply?  Somewhat unlikely.  I know of no way to test this.
> But Tim's analysis and other circumstances suggest it's not worth
> pursuing this possibility any further.

Still possible to be a power supply problem.  Power supplies can go bad.
They can work normally under certain loads, then fail as loads increase
(e.g. heavier CPU work).  They can randomly glitch, switchmode power
supplies are hardly the most reliable design.

A perfectly fine power supply could be glitched by external factors,
such as mains power brown-outs, other equipment starting up (fridges,
air-conditioners).

You're really only going to find the true cause if you can make it
happen again.

Going from what I remember of the thread, the main problem was due to
some unrecoverable read error on the drive.  At some stage they were
probably in an area of the drive that was read at boot-up.  Sometimes a
drive can eventually recover from them, it does try over-and-over, but
usually it would have recovered straight away, if it could.  If the
drive still has those bad sections, if they can't be cleared by
rewriting to the drive, the drive is probably the issue.

If you have a spare drive, I'd put it in and give the old one a thorough
test.

-- 
[tim@localhost ~]$ uname -rsvp
Linux 3.9.10-100.fc17.x86_64 #1 SMP Sun Jul 14 01:31:27 UTC 2013 x86_64 
(always current details of the computer that I'm writing this email on)

Boilerplate:  All mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted, there is
no point trying to privately email me, I only get to see the messages
posted to the mailing list.

Evolution keeps on telling me that it's refreshing, but I still want to
go and get a drink.


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