So I got back from my Mom’s this past weekend and had to bring home the ASUS desktop I had set up for her last year with Linux Mint dual booting Kubuntu.
As previously noted, the upgrade in LM to 22 from 21.4 failed when I attempted it remotely, so we had been using Kubuntu which also had an upgrade ready.
I spent so much time trying to get the thing to boot after Kubuntu upgrade to 24 and think the front USB ports must be going out as I could rarely get the Ventoy flash drive to boot until I moved it to the rear ports.
Finally fired up her old laptop, Ascer Aspire (dual core i5 M from 2013) and installed Linux Mint 24 on it and the constant shut down from overheating while running W10 went away. But I had also installed my Beelink mini pc in her living room with the Smart TV as the monitor and it also works for me to remote into.
Now that I have the ASUS back home, I have been trying to get into the LM folders in order to check if there was anything important there from her time using it. But have been unsucessful in the numerous methods tried.
I can get into Kubuntu if I use the older kernel. But even from a live session, I kept getting the message “this disk is full” and each time I rebooted into a live session the amount of remaining space got smaller until it finally said zero space. I finally went into gparted and saw it was not that full. But I went ahead and reduced the size of LM (partition 3) and enlarged Kubuntu (part 4) so that it had an extra 80 gb of space.
Each attempt to use a live session continued to say “low disk space” and I could not even get terminal to open. Needless to say, I am about ready to give up and just lay a new OS on the SSD in there, but would have liked to use smartmontools to test the disk first as I cannot imagine what else could be causing these extreme issues.
In a couple of live sessions, I got the “failed to start systemd journal.service” message and in Pop OS live, upon restsarting, it could never seem to quit trying to start that service after failure. I ended up powering down to get out of it.
Back into gparted to see what it says about drive space and there is still 70 gb free on the LM partition and 42 gb free on Kubuntu (remember it was not full to begin with and I gave an extra 80, so something is happening to use up disk space). So I am at a loss as to what is generating that low disk message and causing system freeze.
Any suggestions on gaining access to that LM drive where I can just check the home folders would be great. Otherwise, I will need to wipe the drive, reinstall Linux and see if I can test the drive from there.
Thanks so much,
Sheila