Weird Laptop Issues

[Chlorine_Pentoxide]

I would have continued in my previous thread since it is related but it is closed (Ref: https://pchelpforum.net/t/laptop-fai...hutdown.71288/ )

The Problem:
I was using my laptop to just do some Web development work and suddenly the laptop makes repetitive noises (short, low noise, clunky type, in groups of two) the computer just froze up, I quickly hard shutdown the system and rebooted. The noises reappeared on boot continued for some time while the display stuck on the boot screen. Next it went to GRUB2 bootloader and booted into openSUSE which booted into Emergency Mode. I took some logs of the ‘journalctl -xb’ command which I have attached here.

Diagnosis (TL;DR version):

1. Checked reseating the RAM
2. Reseated the RAM into a different slot
3. Removed the battery and booted on AC power
4. Removed the SSD, and booted
5. Removed the HDD, and booted
6. Removed SSD, HDD, Battery and booted into a Live openSUSE Installer ISO on AC power
   None of this fixed the issue; It went straight into recovery or BIOS.

Software Configuration:
openSUSE 15.3 Leap with SLE Patches; Main File System on the SSD with BtrFS except /home subvolume is mounted on the HDD with XFS.

Hardware Configuration:
Asus TUF FX505DT
AMD Ryzen 3rd Gen H-series
NVIDIA GTX 1650
Intel 660p SSD
Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDD

Addition Diagnosis Notes:
The clunky noises were absent when the HDD was removed. My theory is that the HDD is corrupted somehow, and the OS is trying to mount it and failing. But when I removed it since it will search for /home mount partition systemd will have unsatisfied dependency and fail.
I will also add that the BIOS is showing no devices in the SATA port.

There is no way I can test this without replacing the HDD. One way I ‘could’ is by preparing a proper Live USB and then once I am in it trying to mount the HDD, but at the moment I neither have a Live USB nor the means of making one.

Is the Hard drive the problem? Or might it be something else?

[Bruce]

certainly the hard drive would be top of my list.
and sadly the first thing to replace in order to get over that hurdle and see what else is waiting down the track.

[Chlorine_Pentoxide]

@Bruce, here is my latest update, I prepared a LiveUSB of openSUSE and booted into it. I tried to view my harddrive in YaST disks. It shows it has an unformatted capacity of 16.00 EiB (The actual size is not even close, 1 TiB). I then removed the hard drive and did a fresh install of Fedora Workstation 35 and as now it is working ‘fine’.
However I am noticing another problem with the reported RAM. Everytime I reseat the RAM, the reported RAM size decreases, for instance in my first install of Linux it reported 7.9 GB, after my previous reseat it reported 6.9 GB and currently after reslotting the RAM it reports 6.1 GB. Is this a Linux issue or something?

[Bruce]

sadly I’m not a Linux guru.
I last used the ElementaryOS distro about 10 years ago!

what source are those RAM values coming from? or more to the point, can you verify them with another program?
and those RAM sizings are total GB’s, not available or free GB’s?
any chance memory is being assigned to graphics at each boot?

[Chlorine_Pentoxide]

@Bruce Multiple Sources seem to be reporting different numbers:
BIOS: 8192 MB DDR4 RAM Stick
System Monitor : 2.1 GB used out of 6.2 GB available
GNOME Settings: Memory - 5.8 GB
hwinfo (Terminal) : Memory Size 6GB
Now I am confused, what do you think is happening here? Also, does this mean that the HDD is good as dead (it has not been more than 5 months since I purchased it, Seagate Barracuda (1TB 2.5inch) I think has a better reputation than this)?

[Bruce]

while the different amounts given for total memory is unexplained, at this stage it’s more amusing than cause for concern.
that is not your problem for now. and the amount reported by BIOS is of course the believable one.

with the HDD being under warranty still, that would be your 1st priority - replacing that.

as to drive manufactures being better than others - that’s all personal bias in my experience.
I spent 16 years servicing and building PC’s, I started using Western Digital but started seeing high than expected fail rates, then switched to Seagate and for a while found them really good but eventually their fail rates crept up as well.

in the end I was seeing failures in all brands, some more than others, but that was skewed as brands that are sold more would be expected to have more percentage of failures.

so you have to compare apples with apples and in the end, you can end up with a drive that is dead on arrival or one that lasts 15 years and is still in use.