Warning: there's a couple "fun" ( aka "new to me") things in this LONG email. SUMMARY 2-lines-below: 1) on reboot, an initramfs prompt, errors only seen briefly as boot screen overwrites it. Needed fsck. 2) later when things got worse, my solution followed by a different error message re: "environment block too small". the LONG story: Months ago i managed to move wife/maureen's desktop environment to Mint(ubuntu underneath). Usage: firefox,gmail (almost nothing else of note. This took some persuading, but desktops are such a fallback these days......another topic for another day) DESKTOP: 10?yr-old Gigabyte motherboard with sata2/sataII ... 4 ports. I only use 1 sata port. I "gave" it a $90/bestbuy 256g SSD Samsung months ago for /dev/sda which ran well+fast of course, turns out the SSD is actually still fine internally. A FEW WEEKS AGO, the "hint" symptom (1 of 2 in this long story) for disk woes was.... ( it started crashing occasionally, then) ON BOOT, it would sometimes STOP at this prompt initramfs> and with good eyes as the boot-attempt screen(s) would fly by and return to above prompt, I discovered I could fix it with ( actually i did not use the "-y" prompt, but it's the same fix either way) initramfs> fsck -y /dev/sda1 Which worked every time (a few times), nothing scary for an ex-unix-sysadmin, followed by initramfs> exit ######## would allow it to boot and be OK for days or so. I taped THAT magic (fsck...) onto a paper mini-sign on the PC for another rainy day. TODAY, the crash was followed by not booting (random results, kernel panics or bios/grub waiting). So I brought the SSD to my other living room desktop (not booting FROM it...) checked SSD with sudo smartcl -a /dev/sda #### AND ITS FINE. I moved the SSD "back" to wife's PC on another SATA port. It's fine! (motherboard deteriorating i guess....but might last another decade). I did run into.... ("created" by moving the disk i assume) .... a boot/warning error NEW TO ME: On initial boot a WARNING ERROR on the early/black screen (similar to where initramfs> shows up..just before that i think) "warning: environment block too small" was actually ignorable (after a few secs, boot marched on to kernel/logo). But I found "it's a thing" and the error appears solvable with first google hit suggesting linux user# sudo rm /boot/grub/grubenv # or "mv" it somewhere.old; 1024 byte file. ...............# sudo grub-editenv /boot/grub/grubenv create and reboot. Seems good now except (new i think; probably from the sata port move?) there's a ONE MINUTE wait on the initial boot with the Mint logo flashing. Final things-to-inspect: (no need to "fix" /etc/fstab which of course does find the disk parts ( just / and swap) by UUID and /var/log/syslog ( I have exportedthe old history to study, i think the disk errors stopped. ) =========================WRAPUP Haven't solved this learn-all mission yet, but...hope to make it to WLUG THURS EVE and i just thought of a (this) topic. Trick is knowing where to start such a story/tutorial; I'd try to skip over BIOS and sata/disk/etc basics, the fuzzy parts for me involve "initramfs" ... grub ..... and maybe that's it for me. Desired talk/take-home: linux BOOT steps you don't want to know. -doug