x.org falls back to vesa, no mouse/wifi. Weirdest case in my 10 years use

[zhangweiwu]

After using 12.04 (amd64) on my laptop happily for 1.5 years, last week, suddenly these happened all at once:

1. Mouse: Mouse not moving. Both built-in touchpad and USB mouse stop responding. lsusb shows they are attached and recognized by name.
2. WIFI: network-manager applet no longer give a list of wifi.
3. USB: If I attach an USB drive, it is shown in lsusb but not in nautilus, nor the device node (should be /dev/sdb) appear.³
4. VGA: xorg falls back to VESA mode with low resolution.

Also, Totem would play an audio at top volume as if nothing wrong, but speakers remain silent.

Every kind of hardware that doesn't stem booting process would not work after boot. In short it seems the OS is ignorant of all hardware. However, booting into Windows (grub2), and everything are fine in Windows Vista. And boot into live 13.04 Live USB, everything above working as well. That made me believe the problem is with the existing installation. So I did a fresh 13.04 x86-64 installation (repartitioned HDD). The weirdest thing, is that all these devices: Mouse, WIFI, USB, VGA were working during installation, and stoped working the first time the new OS boot from HDD. I can reproduce all of the 1-4 problem on freshly installed 13.04.

I think:
- The problem cannot be with a certain version of kernel, because it is reproduced on both 12.04 and 13.04.
- The problem cannot be related with booting from HDD, because booting Windows from HDD is fine.
- The problem cannot be related with X.org or Gnome, because I can reproduce the 4th problem, the USB one³, in root shell and I assume other problems are related.
- The problem cannot be because of the 4 individual types of hardware, because they were all working during Ubuntu 13.04 installation.
- And not a memory defect - I did a memory test form BIOS, took a few minutes to scan the 3GB memories.
- And not a HDD defect - before I install Ubuntu 13.04 I made an image of the whole HDD with dd(1), and every bit is readable, no IO error.

The only possible explanation left is that one day Ubuntu updated itself to a new kernel without me noticing, and this kernel have problem with my Portége 600 (Toshiba), and this problem is only triggered if booting from HDD. How strange! Validating this hypothesis would take hours of work, so of course I'd like to console here before getting my hands dirty.

This is the weirdest hardware problem I had in my 10 years of using Linux, starting form Debian era. I google and found these people may have the same problem but their questions are neglected:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1933547
http://askubuntu.com/questions/32353...tu-gnome-13-04

DMESG is here:
dmesg.gz
--
Note 3 of the problem 3:

If I attach an USB drive, it is shown in lsusb but not in nautilus, nor the device node (should be /dev/sdb) appear. dmesg says this and nothing more:

[    1.240052] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 2 using ehci_hcd

Shuld be:

[78961.433799] usb 2-3: new high-speed USB device number 9 using ehci-pci
[78961.545223] usb 2-3: New USB device found, idVendor=0930, idProduct=6544
[78961.545241] usb 2-3: New USB device strings: Mfr=1, Product=2, SerialNumber=3
[78961.545250] usb 2-3: Product: TransMemory     
[78961.545259] usb 2-3: Manufacturer: TOSHIBA 
[78961.545267] usb 2-3: SerialNumber: CCA57EFCD5FCCC60FEAF2D3F
[78961.546794] usb-storage 2-3:1.0: USB Mass Storage device detected

[zhangweiwu]

Not any one to share a clue?? This mystery should provoke some interest!..

[tgalati4]

Check your log files /var/log/apt and dkpg.log and see if there were any installations that correlate with your theory.

I would suspect a thermal issue with the motherboard, perhaps around the hard disk area. When booting from USB, the hard disk is not used and stays cool, contact is made and your devices work. When booting from the hard disk, the area near the disk heats up causing an intermittent condition which causes several devices to fail.

I would take your disk out and put it in a USB enclosure and attach it to another machine so you have access to your files. Then I would remove the keyboard and reseat cables and clean out the dust and do an inspection of the internals. Then tighten everything back up and do a fresh install with 12.04.3 and see how that works. I would also use a new disk in case there is a subtle disk issue--perhaps the disk is pulling too much power, causing the voltage rails to fail and thus your devices don't work.

Can you boot without the battery? Perhaps the battery is bad and sucking down the voltage rails. Batteries can fail in several subtle ways--and without warning.

[zhangweiwu]

Check your log files /var/log/apt and dkpg.log and see if there were any installations that correlate with your theory.

Good idea. I loaded these files from backup before I fresh-install 13.04, and both apt and dpkg log shows I haven't upgraded kernel for 2 months before the incident, so it cannot be because of a new kernel slipped in with bugs.

I would suspect a thermal issue with the motherboard, perhaps around the hard disk area. When booting from USB, the hard disk is not used and stays cool, contact is made and your devices work. When booting from the hard disk, the area near the disk heats up causing an intermittent condition which causes several devices to fail.

I would take your disk out and put it in a USB enclosure and attach it to another machine so you have access to your files. Then I would remove the keyboard and reseat cables and clean out the dust and do an inspection of the internals. Then tighten everything back up and do a fresh install with 12.04.3 and see how that works. I would also use a new disk in case there is a subtle disk issue--perhaps the disk is pulling too much power, causing the voltage rails to fail and thus your devices don't work.

Before I start the hassle of tearing down my laptop, I think it's unlikely, for in the same condition booting into Windows Vista is alwasy fine, before or after fresh-install 13.04. I guess it's an no-go.

Can you boot without the battery? Perhaps the battery is bad and sucking down the voltage rails. Batteries can fail in several subtle ways--and without warning.

Yes, I can indeed boot without battery. That's an intersting guess, I wish I could have guessed that. But that isn't the cause.

Later I'll experiment with a different distribution to seee if this problem is Linux related or Ubuntu related. I have never been so confused with Linu before...

[zhangweiwu]

Fought this problems for 2 days, completely clueless. Every possibility guessed and verified invalid. I capitulate. Tonight I just installed opensuse 13.1 x86-64 and all problems are gone. I guess it takes a kernel expert to figure out what happens to my laptop. Switching to a distribution is going to be hard labour and re-learning, but better than staying with Windows.