This is a dual boot system. I hardly ever run windows 10 but, in this case, glad I didn't strip the system.

Linux Mint 20.3, Dell 5490 All In One

I do have timeshift installed, and have not performed any recent upgrades to the system. The last software package added was a network mapping program from software manager. I haven't used it yet.

Recently I've had issues with the system running slowly. I decided to reboot. When the computer came back from a shut down, about 500 lines of messages scrolled down the screen. Ultimately, and this was after a second reboot, ultimately the following cryptic, to me, message appears on the screen.

ACPI Bios error (bug) Failure creating named object [GPE.DEB0] AE_Already_Exists During Name Lookup/catalog (20190816/PObject-220)

BusyBox 1.30.1

Thank you for any assistance offered.

Regards,

fusionstate.

So, you're posting from M$ windows. M$ Edge or Chrome? You have my sympathies. But you probably deserve it for neglecting your linux install

The only thing using that should have busybox is the initrd. So it gets past uefi, loads the kernel, loads the initrd and at some stage after that the thing pukes and you get thrown back to the initrd shell.

IIRC, most distros have a "quiet" option in grub so you won't see stuff. A lot of lines during boot is normal on my box. To make a wild guess, the initrd pukes and something tried to start but I can't make sense of your errors.

You're locked out, AFAICT. Have you a backup? Live usb/cd/dvd? If not make a live usb. I like the slackware one, but you have to make that in linux. Look for a decent one you can burn from windows. As a last resort, boot an iso from dvd or usb and fsck all the linux partitions.

Far as I can tell, I haven't neglected anything linux. Not too long ago, I updated the kernal. The problems began well after that. My data is still good, and I should have the USB I did the install from. Plenty of backups.

I'm considering simply moving on to 21.

As I've mentioned, I have timeshift installed on the system and I've used that before after an update that didn't seem to go well. If possible, could I boot an iso and run timeshift again? Would I have to move the data set from the timeshift directory to the usb, or perhaps it will find it on the hard drive.

Regards,

fusionstate.

I'm not familiar with timeshift so can't be useful there. I have backup usb disks. I would check disk integrity befofre doing much, as if that's the issue, you need to fix it now, before you do anything.

I found it wise not to get far behind with 'apt update && upgrade' as if you do, bad things can happen when you do update.

If you have /home on it's own partition, you can leave that unmounted during the reinstall and put it in fstab later.

EDIT: Even a mobile phone photo of the error messages might give me a clue as to what's actually going on.

Use a live Mint USB to start Timeshift. It is probably better to leave the data on the disk, why move it? Just point the restore were you saved the previous session. Making a new install is an option but version 21 is still beta I think. If you can restore you can always upgrade to 21 later.

No need for Beta.

Linux Mint 21 final arrived on 31st July 2022:
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?author=1

So I tried using the advance boot options, recovery mode. The last lines indicate garbage on sda4 and the suggestion I run fsch manually, with no options. This could explain the lagging and generally slow operations I was experiencing prior to the reboot, which resulted in the current failed state.

I'll likely just load Mint 21 and see if there are irreparable errors on the destination drive.

Thanks for all the assistance,

fusionstate.

There's one of the filesystem options on ext? filesystems that sets a number of days, or remounts between checks. Next reboot, it checks the disk. Une tune2fs or equivalent on other systems.

If I remember well their release cycle was in April/Easter.