Hp mini 2133 4Gb SSD. Disk errors?

[matthekc]

Sorry in advance for the small essay.

A little backstory...
I've got a customer in our PC repair shop that has an Hp mini 2133 with Suse 10.1.
When she came in the machine would not boot to GUI it was full and could not start a GDM session. I cleared out her /tmp and the machine booted fine. I looked at her Suse 10.1 which was 2 years out of support and filling the tiny SSD and suggested a change to something smaller.

The current problem.
I'm have put Linux Mint Xfce on it twice and twice I have eventually had the following start-up problem.
The error says:
errors found while checking the disk for /

I have used Disk Utility to check for smart errors but it says the drive is healthy.
I'd like to fsck from a live usb, but I can't get /dev/sdb1 to umount.

If the disk is bad and I can prove it then I will suggest a new disk or maybe an SD card install as a workaround. If the disk isn't bad then what is my issue?

What tests should I run, is there a good live usb diagnostic I could use?

Someone from the Ubuntu forums sent me here he said:

"TheeMahn over at Ultimate Edition Linux has been playing with writing operating system to SSD for a while now and says he wouldn't go back to the old mechanical drives. maybe he or one of his good buddies could point you in the right direction."

I have a thread over there too.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1576573

[2hot6ft2]

Hi matthekc, and welcome to the forum,

Before installing the new OS did you wipe the drive with the DOS tool HDDErase?
Bootable ISO HDDErase 3.3 from here Erasing an SSD
It restores SSD's to a clean slate.
Excellent anandtech article on SSD'd here:
Restoring Your Drive to Peak Performance
Don't miss this part:

In order for HDDERASE to work you need to have your SATA controller running in Legacy IDE mode, you can select this in your BIOS.

Considering the age and size it probably doesn't have TRIM support and this page explains that real well:
The Trim Command: Coming Soon to a Drive Near You (I'm not sure it matters in Linux)
Look around there and you will find a few tricks like making the partition slightly smaller than the drive size which can help.

As for tests there is this in Ultimate Edition
Applications >System Tools > System Profiler and Benchmark
Or if in mint install it with

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

In windows there is
PCMark Vantage
SYSMark 2007

When trying to run fsck from the liveusb did you make sure to right click the swap partition on the SSD and select swapoff as well as unmounting /dev/sdb1?
Have you tried forcing fsck to run on the next boot with

Code: Select all

sudo touch /forcefsck

I'm sure Thee and some others may have more ideas but that should make for a start.

Might take a look at Thees thread: SSD's in *nix while you're at it.

P.S. SLC (Single Layer Chip) SSD's are recommended for boot and OS installs not MLC (Multi Layer Chip) SSD's according to one of the SSD manufacturer sites (I forget which one I read that on). SLC is more expensive than MLC too naturally.

[matthekc]

I read somewhere to try EXT2 on this SSD drive. So I did that at the end of the day on Friday now that seems to be working for me. Any ideas why?

[ixnod]

EXT2 from my understanding does not have journaling nor does it have encryptio support on it. Unfortunately I am not one of the guys that is savvy in the ways of the SSD but each filesystem type has its own pros and cons with it.

ext2 was the default filesystem in several Linux distributions, including Debian and Red Hat Linux, until supplanted more recently by ext3, which is almost completely compatible with ext2 and is a journaling file system. ext2 is still the filesystem of choice for flash-based storage media (such as SD cards, and USB flash drives) since its lack of a journal minimizes the number of writes and flash devices have only a limited number of write cycles. ( taken from wikipedia article)

which brings up an issue of how often does the disk gets written to, it may be high time to update or upgrade the SSD.

[markfinn]

If you have a problem in your HP Mini 2133 4GB SSD, then you have to reinstall Windows XP using a USB drive. You will also need a special tool to copy the installation files and USB-stick/SD card bootable.