neon 5.18.0 restart gets spining spiral only, ESC, Ctrl-Alt-Del, now what to do?

[pwrcul]

I had a series of surprises while enjoying my desktop system's reliability up to now after the KDE Neon Plasma 5.18.0 update though I am not convinced that is the cause.

A WiFi dongle stopped working.
The USB it had been plugged into did not automount an MP3 player.

So I decided to do a restart.
I got the Neon 5.18.0 logo and spinning spiral endlessly.
I waited more than 24 hours. It was still spinning.

I think it risky to just do a forced reset or shutdown.

Last night I got a suggestion at the https://forum.kde.org/viewtopic.php?...428669#p428669 forum to press ESC.
Pressing ESC revealed clear text lines showing 2 cycles of shutting down messages and the start of a third.
Each except the first 2 lines and 2 others are marked with "OK" in the left side of the screen.

The third cycle began and did not proceed further after these two lines:
Starting reboot . . .
Stopped monitoring of LVM2 mirrors, snapshots etc., using dmeventd or progress polling . . ..

As at times when I have Plasma running I tried Ctrl Alt Del first with no effect, then Alt-F1, to gain a chance to restart or shut down, I got a dot in the upper L corner. I did not try sudo shutown -H now etc. I left the machine running at my partner's place and will return there later.

I am open to suggestions.

Meanwhile I succeeded in downloading a fresh copy of Neon user edition now that I have a faster connection,

Any idea of what happened to cause the restart problem and preceding ones? I have not found the same exact symptoms in a forum post or google search.

[GreyGeek]

Although I haven't had it happen since I began running my Nvidia GT650M as the desktop driver 4 years ago, it sometimes happened following an update that $HOME/.Xauthority ownership was changed from my account name to root. I changed it back using sudo and rebooted.

[Snowhog]

Personally, I'd suspect a full disc. I'd go ahead, and from an Alt-F1 console, type: sudo shutdown -R now (a reboot). IF that works; the OS shuts down and reboots; interrupt it so you see the Grub Menu and select Advanced options for ubuntu and choose the current kernel (recovery mode) option. You'll be presented with a Recovery Menu (filesystem state: read-only) window. Use your down arrow button to highlight root and then press your Enter/Return key. You will be prompted to Press Enter for maintenance. Press Enter and you will be a a # prompt. Type: df -h and press Enter. In the listing, how much space is listed under Use% for your root ( / ) partition? After you've noted that value, press ESC and you'll be returned to the Recovery Menu (filesystem state: read-only) window with resume highlighted. Press Enter, then Enter again to continue booting.

[pwrcul]

Thanks Snowhog and GreyGeek,
I will follow those leads when I get back to my machine in my partner's place in about 1-2 hours.

[pwrcul]

I tried several Ctrl-Alt-Fs to get a login, but got no terminal screen, so I blindly logged in and did a sudo shutdown. None worked.
So I decided to force a hard stop by holding down the power button.

Luckily, on booting into recovery mode, all looks OK.
I have a separate /home. I checked space on it and the OS disk.
/home is essentially full: 95% at this time with 6.5 GB free of 134.5 GB on sda6.

I have a Kubuntu live DVD with Partition Manager and my notes from the last time I adjusted things.
I will start figuring out what to move, etc.
If you have comments or suggestions I welcome them.

(In my temporary move into my partner's place while my condo is remodeled, 3 months so far but ending within weeks, I have lost track of where my portable WD backup disk is, but I have a conventional WD drive with lots of space I can backup to using a live Clonezila disk to image /home, etc.)

[Snowhog]

95% full on /home is not very good, but not a deal breaker. What can be a problem is not having enough space in your root partition. What does df -h report on that?

[pwrcul]

I opened a terminal and got what may be my first df -h report.
If I understand correctly, the third line has the root Linux partition
/dev/sda5 35G 27G 6.0G 82% /
And it looks like it is sufficient.

Here's the report
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 12G 0 12G 0% /dev
tmpfs 2.3G 2.9M 2.3G 1% /run
/dev/sda5 35G 27G 6.0G 82% /
tmpfs 12G 79M 12G 1% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5.0M 4.0K 5.0M 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 12G 0 12G 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0 18M 18M 0 100% /snap/pdftk/9
/dev/loop1 92M 92M 0 100% /snap/core/8592
/dev/loop2 92M 92M 0 100% /snap/core/8689
/dev/sda6 135G 122G 6.6G 95% /home
tmpfs 2.3G 20K 2.3G 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/sda8 32G 24G 6.8G 78% /media/jim/736598cf-8995-41a4-97ca-f863d42d79cf
/dev/sda7 35G 16G 17G 49% /media/jim/f5b9c299-3ab3-4065-8848-b37d68092eaf
/dev/sda4 20G 5.0G 14G 28% /media/jim/27b51aae-ceba-4896-8cf2-768756fddef8
/dev/sdb3 481G 126G 331G 28% /media/jim/clonebak
/dev/sdb2 116G 30G 80G 28% /media/jim/83427977-6185-489c-ae11-e7ea1544b809
/dev/sda1 142G 78G 64G 55% /media/jim/063E0D2E2FEA93F9
/dev/sdb1 49G 37G 13G 75% /media/jim/9C4EF6054EF5D84A

[Snowhog]

Yes. Your root partition has 82% used. That isn't an issue; yet. That your /home directory has 95% used "might" actually be an issue; might.

IIRC, when a disc reaches 90-95% used, you begin to run into potential problems. Some house cleaning seems to be in order.

[pwrcul]

Thanks, Snowhog.
I will clean, backup to the spinning drive with Clonezilla and see about reorganizing.
I started using Kdenlive and video takes up space.
I just checked my notebook with the history of the desktop machine I built 7 years ago.
So I have lots to think about.