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How a while-loop crashed my laptop (and how i fixed it)

I was doing some programming work in Javascript and was busy with a while loop. Accidentally, I made an infinite loop and the Chrome browser started to become very slow. Not only that, the whole operating system (Pop OS) froze. So, I pressed and held the power button until the computer shuts down, which is basically the only option left to do when the system freezes. Up until now, this always had worked, and after restarting, I could always login.

Not this thime.

This time, after rebooting, the graphical login prompt didn’t appear, just a blank screen. After a while, it fell back into terminal mode, saying it was in emergency mode.

As I had to use my computer the next day for a training I was slightly worried. Fortunately, I had another computer that I could use the next day, and the next morning after the training I took to the internet and tried to repair the pc. After failing to mount the problematic harddrive partition and failing to repair it with fsck and dumpe2fs, this is what I did:

  • Boot the laptop from usb stick with Pop OS installer
  • Fire up a terminal
  • Type lsblk to view the devices
  • mkfs.ext4 -n /dev/sdb3 to obtain the location of a superblock backup
  • fsck -b 98304 /dev/sdd to repair the partition
  • answer ‘yes’ to all the fixes

After these steps, I could login to my laptop again!

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Post Author: admin

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