Problem Description:
Yesterday, I installed the HWE kernel update on Ubuntu 24.04. After rebooting, I encountered graphics card issues. I tried to roll back to the previous kernel, but something went wrong, and the filesystem switched to ‘read-only’ mode. Since I have recent backups, I performed a clean reinstall, but the issues persist. I removed the graphics card to rule it out, but the installation process is still taking an eternity. The system doesn’t become completely unusable, but it runs very slowly, and Snap package installations never finish. Upon rebooting, I get an initramfs error. I’ve tried running fsck with no luck. I’ll be troubleshooting this further tomorrow, but I’d appreciate any insights you might have.
Sorry, you’re right. In my rookie mind, I assumed it would be a more common error hehe. I’ll come back later with a screenshot, and if I manage to access the terminal, I’ll copy whatever comes up.
This morning, I spent some time testing several guides and tips, jotting down any useful details I could find both inside and outside the terminal. I’ve reached the conclusion that this is a hardware issue, so I’m closing the thread and marking the “solution”: buying a new SSD.
On the surface, the drive looks fine, and all diagnostics indicate it’s in good health. However, I tried installing a different Linux distribution just in case the problem was an incompatibility with Kernel 6.17, but it didn’t work. In a last-ditch effort, I installed Windows 10; it worked, but everything was extremely slow. Downloading LibreOffice, for example, took forever despite having a good WiFi connection (in fact, YouTube videos were loading at normal speeds). This confirms to me that the problem lies with the SSD unit.
I’ll be buying a new NVMe drive on Monday or Tuesday. I’ll try testing the current one in an external setup, as I’ve read that the SATA cable could be the culprit, and I’m not in a position to just throw away an SSD for no reason. According to the diagnostics I ran in Ubuntu, the drive has very few usage cycles, which makes sense since it belongs to my father’s computer, and he only uses it for checking email and a few other basic tasks. It’s a shame.
In short —and sorry for the long post— it seems that for some reason, the SSD is dying. The rest of the computer works fine, and I’ve installed Ubuntu on a USB drive without any issues other than the typical slowness of that medium. This gives me confidence that simply swapping in a new SSD will get everything back to normal.
Even though you’ve already closed this topic, I still want to mention that I encountered the exact same original issues you did (which seems rather odd given the fact that you’ve concluded it to be a hardware issue).
After updating to 6.17 my computer booted with graphics card issues which I initially tried to resolve by purging and reinstalling the nvidia driver. Soon after that it seemed like the whole system came to a stop and my filesystem got put into read-only mode. Me not being familiar with anything kernel related immediately assumed it being a hardware issue as I saw IO errors across the board. I too thought my SSD had died. After several reboots I was also suddenly stuck in an initramfs shell, which I never heard about before…
Luckily my system has 2 SSD’s. One for the OS and one for data storage. After backing up everything and formatting both I did a clean install of 24.04.3 on the SSD that previously just contained some data. Result: same issue.
It being very unlikely that both SSD’s have died at the same time I did another clean install on the second SSD with my network cable unplugged which resulted in everything going back to normal. I only now know this is because of the installer containing version 6.14 of the kernel which doesn’t get bumped to 6.17 immediately when connected to the internet.
For now I just put the kernel apt packages on hold on my system until some newer versions come out which hopefully address this issue in some way. But at least I got a working system again. Not sure if my experience is of any help to you as you already established it to an SSD issue. It’s at least a bit peculiar that we’ve had about the same issues after updating to 6.17.
You’re right — since I didn’t have another SSD, I couldn’t really check. So I wanted to update my post today, and I might have some good news for you and anyone else running into this issue. Yesterday, I saw a Linux Mint user on Reddit with the exact same problem, and they fixed it by disabling Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O (or VT-d) in the BIOS. That solution worked for me too. After disabling it, I installed Ubuntu 25.10 (just for the three months left until the new LTS…) and I’ve been installing things for a couple of hours without any issues.
It doesn’t seem like a feature regular users really need — it’s mostly for servers. But I’ve read that on older motherboards — mine’s 12 years old — it could cause catastrophic errors like the one we’re dealing with. Hopefully, this is the same issue for you. Writing this from a computer that, just yesterday, couldn’t even run Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, or Windows 10. xD
That’s it! Similar to you I’m using an older motherboard (about 10 years old) which indeed had VT-d set to enabled in the BIOS. After disabling it, unholding all of the kernel packages and updating to 6.17 everything is still running smoothly .
I think you’re right in saying that most users probably won’t need this feature. While I do run some VM’s on my machine it seems like VT-d is used for hardware passthrough like GPU’s (which I don’t think I need) so I should be fine in disabling it.
Thanks for sharing this solution. I hope it may also help others who run into the same issue.
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