[Wiltshire] Suspect hard drive infant mortality

[David Fletcher]

This was a few months ago but....

I now don't think there ever was anything wrong with the hard drive.
Can't recall if it was happening at the time but I've kept having very
regular problems with the computers, both desktop and laptop, not
closing down properly and having to hold down the power button to force
them off which of course I hate doing. Apparently this can be bad for
the file system. A couple of weeks ago I found that there is a latest
but 11 years old BIOS update for my Acer M2N-E SLI desktop motherboard
which I applied. It greatly speeded up booting (something to do with
the AMD graphics card) but did nothing for the shutdown problem.

Then I found out about a certain config file....
/etc/systemd/system.conf.d/50_linuxmint.conf

the content of which on both computers is now:-
# To override these values, create your own file in
/etc/systemd/systemd.conf.d/60_custom.conf.
# Reload configuration with "sudo systemctl daemon-reload"
# Test with "systemctl show"

[Manager]

# Reduce shutdown timeout from 90s to 10s.
# If you rely on important tasks to successfully finish during the
shutdown sequence, set the timeout to something greater than 90s.
# Original
# DefaultTimeoutStopSec=10s
# Changed to
DefaultTimeoutStopSec=50s
# in order to hopefully get a proper shutdown without having to hold
down
# the power button see
# 
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmint/comments/j6ybja/linux_mint_20_stuck_at_shutdown/
# DF 20210525

# Rationale:
# This is done for the following reasons:
# - 90s is too long for users to wait (they think it's hanging
indefinitely, and they eventually just use their power button)
# - Cups, minidlna have made this a buggy mess for years now and
there's no sign of improvement for the near future
# - This is a workaround many people have used in Mint, Ubuntu, Arch,
Fedora and many other distributions, although reducing the start
# timeout is known to possibly affect the journal, no adverse effects
were reported after reducing the stop timeout.
# - For our audience (desktop users), this makes a lot of sense. It
would be different for a server, or a machine which relies on shutdown
# scripts to perform important tasks, but for most people this fixes a
very important issue and is unlikely to create new ones.


I've not done the instruction at the top to override the 10s by adding
my own config file. Perhaps I should. However both desktop (running
ext4) and laptop (now running btrfs) have been properly shutting down
each time. I can't tell for certain that forcing power off is what
caused the laptop to crash badly in the first place but I thought that
this would be useful information to share with anybody else running
Mint.

Dave