Ubuntu 18.04.2 unresponsive on hd activity

[Ralf Mardorf]

The OP does use 18.04. I'm an Arch Linux user, a rolling release close
to upstream and just in case I hold in reserve an Ubuntu 16.04 long term
support. However, to make backups of my Arch Linux and Ubuntu install
I'm using one and the other live media. At the moment I tend to go with
Xubuntu 18.10. Apart from two minor hickups, one related to screen
locking and the other related to an archiver GUI (I'm anyway a command
line guy), I didn't notice any issue. I'm just not upgrading 16.04
because roxterm was dropped. Actually roxterm was dropped by upstream,
so Ubuntu maintainers had a valid reason to discontinue packaging. In
the meantime upstream started to continue roxterm. I can't imagine a
live without roxterm :D and I dislike to make my own roxterm package.
To make a long story short, if 18.04 fails in such an odd way, I
recommend to use 18.10 for testing purpose and if necessary to
downgrade to 16.04, which is supported until 2021. However, I agree
that debugging the issue is important.