Frequent crashes - Checkdisk for Steam Deck?

[Sirius VI]

Hey everyone,

I'm a Windows user with little experience in Linux and therefore, I sometimes have difficulties with the Steam Deck. I have spent most of my time with the steam deck setting up emulators and there were the occasional crashes and I had to hard reset the Steam Deck many many times.

3 days ago, I finally wanted to play some Half Life 2 and was really excited about it. However, after launching the game for the first time, it just crashed on the intro screen (the guy's head). I had to hard reset. This happened 4 times in a row when finally on the 5th time, the game launched. I immediately tried to reproduce the crashes, but it the game launched fine 3 times in a row.

yesterday I tried to Launch Half Life 2 again and the crashes returned. 3 times in a row. On the 4th time, the game launched fine.

Since then I haven't experienced any more crashes, but I'm still worried that something is broken.

Is it possible that because of the frequent hard resets, the ssd is somehow messed up? On windows, I'd normally run checkdisk, but I don't know how to do that on Linux and I've read that performing checkdisk on Linux wrong could damage your ssd.

Can anyone help me?

[Quad_Plex]

What exactly do these crashes look like?

[jrepin]

The filesystem used od Steam Deck is ext4[en.wikipedia.org]. so when you want to check it you can use e2fsck[linux.die.net] command line tool (run it as root user using "sudo[linux.die.net]" inside Konsole app in desktop mode). Use the "-n" option to be safe, and the partiion is /dev/nvme0n1p8. And you have to set the password before you can use sudo.

WARNING: Be sure to read the documentation about the e2fsck options since yeah using the wrong ones and especially on a mounted filesystem you can damage the filesystem (mind you: not the hardware, as in SSD itself).

[Sirius VI]

Originally posted by Quad_Plex:

What exactly do these crashes look like?

The screen just freezes. Sometimes it turns black and the deck doesn't respond anymore. Hard reset is the only way to get it to work again.

[Sirius VI]

Originally posted by jrepin:

The filesystem used od Steam Deck is ext4[en.wikipedia.org]. so when you want to check it you can use e2fsck[linux.die.net] command line tool (run it as root user using "sudo[linux.die.net]" inside Konsole app in desktop mode). Use the "-n" option to be safe, and the partiion is /dev/nvme0n1p8. And you have to set the password before you can use sudo.

WARNING: Be sure to read the documentation about the e2fsck options since yeah using the wrong ones and especially on a mounted filesystem you can damage the filesystem (mind you: not the hardware, as in SSD itself).

I'm super insecure with this. I've done some research as well and it seems you have to be really careful and I'm really not sure what command I should use. For example I red that you need to "unmount" the drives before checking hem?

Anyway, I'm not sure I want to touch this unless someone can give a safe command that I can just run without danger of losing my data (internal SSD and SD card). I've set the password already, so that shouldn't be an issue.

[Prezidentas]

I'd just re-image the deck and try again, seems way easier. It's not like a check utility will find bad sectors in an SSD...

[Quad_Plex]

Originally posted by Sirius VI:

Originally posted by Quad_Plex:

What exactly do these crashes look like?

The screen just freezes. Sometimes it turns black and the deck doesn't respond anymore. Hard reset is the only way to get it to work again.

I'm afraid you are affected by the dreaded 'GPU Reset' issue that plagues some Decks. I had it on mine and ended up having to RMA it. Read up on more people with the issue here
https://steamcommunity.com/app/1675200/discussions/1/3186864655209404156/

[Marlock]

it's a longshot but in case wifi instabilities are causing the crashes, try the usual workarounds for wifi issues on the Steam Deck... one of those might help it go back to behaving correctly

1) enable developer mode, then go to the new "developer" tab in steam settings and disable wifi power savings

2) unhide your wifi ssid if hidden (hiding it is well know to not really be useful for privacy nor for security, by the way)

3) if 2,4GHz and 5GHz bands are joined in a single ssid, split them in the router configs and use only one of them

4) choose a fixed wifi channel instead of leaving it in auto (configure the same channel in both the router and the deck)

5) try a different router brand/model or a smartphone wifi hotspot... some people have issues only with certains devices but not with others

6) try an ethernet dongle instead of the deck's wifi

7) try a wifi dongle with well-known good linux support instead of using the built-in wifi chip