16.04 problems - install, inactive/suspend, hard disk

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Thu, 8 Sep 2016 00:11:05 -0700, rikona wrote:
>Powered down, reboot, no logon screen, reboot/fiddled
>a few times & finally got logon screen with an error screen, got pix
>of errors - can send these if needed. Could logon OK, but tried
>another reboot which came up with no errors. Finished the update,
>installed a lot of pgms and things seemed to be going well - looked
>like it was working. I'm not sure if the thermald error got fixed or
>not. Any way to tell?

What do the error messages tell you?

You could fix broken packages and not configured packages by running
  
  sudo apt update
  sudo apt -f install
  sudo dpkg --configure -a

then check if there's the need to install thermald

  sudo apt install thermald

>Left the box for about an hour or so. When I came back, black screen
>BUT could get nothing else with mouse move or keys. Power down, was OK
>when it came back up. Finally reset parameters to not shut down, so
>stays on all the time now. Would like to get it to reduce power and
>still work when I come come back, though. How can I get it to do that?
>
>Next problem was the 3Gb HD. When I try to access it in any way, the
>HD light flashes for at least an hour [snip]
>please let me know if you need more info - the
>above is a bit general, but I'm not sure what would be most helpful.

Useful is describing the issue, as you already did and in addition to
search log files for entries that could be related to the issues.
Search engines could help to find out what log file to use and
to care about what info provided by the log file. Sometimes running a
tool and reading it's output instead of reading a log file could help
troubleshooting. 

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/LinuxLogFiles
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10222449/what-is-xsession-errors
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/TroubleShootingGuide
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Troubleshooting
https://www.google.com/
https://www.startpage.com/
https://duckduckgo.com/

Regards,
Ralf