apt full-upgrade causes system lock-up

[Colin Law]

On Thu, 2 Jun 2022 at 11:58, Bo Berglund <bo.berglund at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I don't know if this belongs here but I'll make a test:
>
> I have an HP ProDesk system on a remote location with Linux Mint 20.3.
> I access it via PuTTY (SSH) mostly but I also have a possibility to use VNC
> towards it, but that happens very seldom.
> The remote and home networks are connected via VPN on the router.
>
> Today I experienced a weird lock-up when doing a sudo apt full-upgrade
> operation.
>
> After it ran for a while it stalled for a long time with something that sat at
> the 90% position.
> Then it finally finished with an error message as follows:
>
> ....
> (apt output messages streaming by)
> Get:19 http://packages.linuxmint.com una/upstream amd64 firefox-locale-en amd64
> 101.0+linuxmint1+una [691 kB]
> Fetched 86,7 MB in 15s (5 854 kB/s)
> Preconfiguring packages ...
>
> Here is where it sat for a long time at 90+% until that disappeared and the
> following was printed:
>
> dpkg: unrecoverable fatal error, aborting:
>  loading files list file for package 'linux-headers-5.4.0-105': cannot read
> /var/lib/dpkg/info/linux-headers-5.4.0-105.list (Input/output error)
> Bus error
> E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (2)
> W: Problem unlinking the file /var/cache/apt/pkgcache.bin - pkgDPkgPM::Go (30:
> Read-only file system)

I suspect there is a problem with the hardware.  For some reason it
has put the disc into read only mode as a protective measure.  If you
can reboot then first check the SMART data for the disc.  If that
doesn't show any problems then check syslog to see why it put the
drive into read only.  However, if there is any important data that is
not backed up that is really important then you might want to take
alternative action, such as taking the disc out and recovering the
data rather than rebooting, in case you lose everything.

Colin