The Wi-Fi 6E & Bluetooth 5.2 controllers in my motherboard died today.
Until the motherboard can be replaced, the solution is to disable both in the UEFI BIOS. This is the only state in which the PC boots normally. Enabling the Bluetooth controller causes the boot process to spend about a minute trying to initialize the device, enabling the Wi-Fi controller causes the whole system to freeze with at the login screen and/or eventually reboot itself.
Today, a number of USB devices were unavailable for no apparent reason.
Having a terminal always visible running dmesg -w the following showed up:
xhci_hcd 0000:0b:00.3: Abort failed to stop command ring: -110
xhci_hcd 0000:0b:00.3: xHCI host controller not responding, assume dead
xhci_hcd 0000:0b:00.3: HC died; cleaning up
Hmm, assume dead... that doesn’t sounds good.
This is the kind of thing that makes you think, this really only happens to me.
Back in June, when the availability and price of graphics card finally approached relatively normal values, I got myself an new ASUS GeForce TUF Gaming RTX 3070 Ti OC Edition (to replace the old ASUS GeForce GTX 1070 STRIX from 2017). It still was still nearly $800 but it was clearly never going to come down to $570 the old one costed back in August 2017.
Then, in September, the new card died. Somewhat surreptitiously...
My only NAS is my PC. At least, what people would usually do with, or build a NAS for, I just do it with my PC.
Most of my disk storage space is a BTRFS RAID 1 using two 6TB WD BLACK 3.5″ HDD. This setup offers block-level redundancy which is better than the classic device-level redundancy offered by Linux Software RAID or hardware RAID. To keep BTRFS file systems healthy, it is strongly recommended to run a weekly scrub to check everything for consistency. For this, I run the script from crontab every Saturday night (it usually ends around noon the next day).
One Sunday morning, after many successful scrubs, I woke up to both disks failing, each in a different way. But this was not the end of it. And the end of this adventure, disks emerged victorious.
Keeping reading to find out how the disks came back from the dead.
