The last time I saw this was on a slow-failing HDD.

Check a quick fsck might get you a few answers. You can find more info in the Linux manual. It could just be one or two bad blocks that you can recover and fix the problem (though, ofc, it’s time to backup your data).

The other, slightly unusual time I’ve seen it is with mixed RAM. 16gb made of 2x6g and then 2x4gb did some real odd things to the system. If it’s not the disk, and your box will boot with one stick of ram, try it to see if it fixes the issue. It could be that your RAM speeds are off (or your like me and just put two sticks you had lying around, and it basically worked until it didn’t).

An outlier, that I’ve not seen on modern machines is io/wait for a CD-ROM to spin up, even if your not accessing the CD-ROM. Normally caused by bad cabling. Based on the age of your machine, this is unlikely, but it might be worth unplugging devices to see if one is bad and not reporting properly.

This is, if course, assuming dmsg is empty

Final thought: see if your running SELinux. If you are, turn it off and try again. Those policies are complex, and something installed in a non-standard place could be causing SELinux to slow IO as it fills your logs with warnings.

Hope that helps,

No preventing me from formatting, but from resizing the disk so I can make space for the linux on the internal SSD.

It’s a HP Envy.

TBH, I hadn’t realised it had also chosen to encrypt the inserted SD card when I added it.

I would install from a USB to another USB, but the Debian Live USB stick doesn’t recognise anything else that I plug into the laptop, so I can’t go USB to USB, hence the need to use windows.

It’s posts like this that make me wonder whether the problems Lemmy.world is having are connected. If major players like Russia don’t want this news out, taking out accessible sources like Lemmy would work.

Then again, I see China is running it’s own propaganda in its own Lemmy/c, so I’m surprised Russia isn’t

That sucks.

Imagine the loss of income from that. No question of compensation, no suggestion that what they were doing might have an affect.

Years of work gone, just like that.

There are no positive things left to say. I’m very glad im able to mostly move off Twitter. Now to just help the tools on other media sites catch up.

Feels bad man

It’s also difficult to ‘leave’ chromium when many of the alternative browsers are based on the engine.

I love Vivaldi, but at it’s cute it’s running the Google web engine. This is also going to be part of the problem.

There are very few non-Google web engines, and even fewer being used by other browser makers.

I thought I’d test this. I got the essay as the 4th result, the top 3 are about mobile phone signal, with the essay coming in as 4th.

I use Vivaldi on Android. DDG has my location set to the UK.