I made a couple of mistakes. . .upgraded on my computer from 16 to 18, and my laptop
went to pot. ..

Lockups.. . Extremely high usage of the processor, which keeps the cooling fan on 24/7. Even
when sitting idle.

I ended up having to reload my entire computer back to 16, losing everything.

So, I pulled up my VMWare and created a virtual disk for Linux 18. . .
Exact same thing was happening when I fired it up. . .

Is it me?

Am I the only one that is having lockups, extremely high usage of the processor, that
heats up my laptop?

I have 16gig of RAM, 2TB of disk, fairly fast processor speed. Three years ago, I bought
this as the top of the line laptop.

It is a toshiba, with an intel chip. It says 'CORE 17".

I know better to upgrade, because I know it will crash my entire system again.

Any thoughts on this?

Running Ubuntu

I have two machines running Ubuntu and have been though upgrades from 11.04 to 12.04 to ... to 18.04. I have frequently encountered problems after the upgrade, most frequently, because support for my previous video driver was dropped and the new one chosen by the installer didn't work very well on my machine. I have found that an unsuitable video driver can cause crashes, slow machine response, or even failure to boot to anything but a blank screen.

Another possibility: the default desktop environment (selectable at log on) changed from 16.04 to 18.04. If you haven't tried one of the other alternatives, you might try that.

To help debug these sorts of problems, something I have started doing is keeping a record of all installed software before and after the upgrade. I run

This at least allows you to compare the old and new installations (in my case, drivers) and figure out what might have happened.

I have also found it useful to browse the logs found in /var/log for hints of what happened after a software failure. You might have to boot into Grub recovery mode to look at these files if the machine is crashing during or after log on.

You mentioned "18.x".
Which can have one speculate you tried the Beta 18.10 Cuttlefish, does this happen with 18.04 LTS?
When running in a VMware virtual environment, most all hardware is virtual, the only things that may be the same as a hardware install would be the processors and chipset, so this narrows things down to two possible hardware items that may be clashing with the version of Ubuntu you tried.
It may help if you specify the exact model of Toshiba?
And when this is happening, you can run command: top which may give insight into what's causing heavy resource consumption, post the outputs, be informative.

Yes, it happens with 18.04 LTS. . ..
Extremely high usage of CPU, causing fan to run continuously in high mode.
After a while the system seems to have possibly a I/O overload, and locks up my computer.

I finally gave up on it. . .Even in VMware, it does the same thing.

Sad part of it all, This is the first time Ubuntu has really failed me. On many different machines.

Yikes, Did you try Debian I used it a little for curiosity sake. seemed stable and the fan ran normal. Ubuntu never worked right on my Laptops except Maverick Meerkat.

You're describing symptoms, not the actual problem(s) - without data we will be groping around in the dark, just like you. Fire up the guest again and as a minimum get top output as suggested - maybe sensors for temps too and the output of "inxi -Fxz".You should never lose everything - see my sigline. Having a separate /home partition can make reinstalls a lot less painful - been there, done it; several times.

1 members found this post helpful.

Can you describe what you are doing here?

Once I installed 18 TLS and the crash problem started, I could not reinstall 16 LTS over 18 LTS.
I couldn't undo the installation either. . .

But, at the same time, i will fully admit I am NOT even CLOSE to being an expert on Ubuntu or linux in general.

Dwayne

here is a link that might help explain why you might want to do it, and how to. There will be a bunch on the net - I think I've even seen one with screen shots.

You need to explain why you can't simply re-install - any messages ?. Maybe you need to delete the partitions first to get some space the installer can use - or assign mount-points yourself. They former is probably easiest.

What happened, was my computer went into a continuous loop. . . .never getting up to a command prompt or a place I could cut in. . .then it would
reset itself and start as if someone turned on the computer for the first time. This happened after the first update from the LTS. Before that first update,
it would seem to go into some kind of I/O lockup. . .slowly (in a course of bringing up about a dozen websites (the same one actually) it would freeze up/ Lock up.
I would have to reset it.

I update came, then I had continuous loop. I finally gave up because I couldn't break into the loop for a command prompt or anything. So I reloaded
16.x LTS, and haven't had a problem since.

I used VMWare and made a 4ogig virtual disk, and the same thing happened there. It went into some kind of I/O lockup. . .but it has NOT done the reset loop.

I do like your idea that uou say a person never has to lose anything. . . i am going to have to look into that. I usually pick the default installation
when I install Ubuntu.

are you saying you're running ubuntu as a virtual machine?

gnu/linux does not typically do this.
please hold down shift during early boot, that should get you into the grub menu, from there choose "recovery" options or similar (advanced =>).