It started among other shenanigans when I upgraded Debian from Bookworm to Trixie a week ago. Now, starting up my PC fails around four times out of five.
The GRUB menu is reached right away. I choose the one and only OS existing on this x86-64 machine, namely Debian 13 "Trixie". After a few seconds a message appears in triplicate: Decompression failed with status 7. Then, after some more seconds:
Give up waiting for root file system device (…) ALERT! UUID=eb253f2f-5fbd-4952-810a-2841b01e3425 does not exist. Dropping to a shell.
I checked more than thrice: there is a partition with UUID=eb253f2f-5fbd-4952-810a-2841b01e3425 and it does contain the OS files.
After switching it off and on again three or four times, everything starts up perfectly as if nothing ever happened and works as expected for hours.
This box being ten years old, I'm starting to suspect hardware issues. The main SSD is about one year old however, and fsck reveals no problem.
I checked the RAM with Memtest86+ ; it yields an apparently somber picture which sums up as Status: Failed! with a continuous stream of errors showing up during the twenty-some minutes of letting the test run. It's the first time that I use this tool and I don't really know what to make of it. On no other occasion did I encounter problem that led me to suspect faulty RAM.
I haven't found online any other mention of "Decompression failed with status 7" and other supposedly non-existant UUID always find rather straightforward explaination.
The closest related issue that I found in unix.stackexchange.com is Debian Buster - UUID Does not exist. Dropping to shell problem from five years ago, but it is rather unconclusive.
What should I do to pinpoint the origin of this dysfunction ?
/* -------------- addendum ----------------------- */ In the three days since I posted the above, this computer booted six or seven times, only once exhibiting the aformentioned dead end, all other boots going seamlessly. And yet, I haven't done the slightest thing.
