what's all the diagnostics programs to run typically on a laptop?

ill just run those diagnoistics and see if it says anything

mint doesnt update

some error, long

mint 18.1

That seems to be a fairly common - it's usually caused by 'some problem'.

1 members found this post helpful.

Your question does not provide any information that would be useful to others in providing help.

There are many tools included with your distro that can be used to diagnose various problems, but we would need to know what problem you are having in order to suggest what to use and how to use it.

"some error" does not give any clues. Please tell us what command you ran which produced the error, and include the exact error message itself as when asking for help.

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didnt do any 'commands' just clicked on the update button in mint

also an error on startup

starting version 232 ERROR '/dev/disk/by-label/' did not show up after 30 secs. sh: can't access tty: job control turned off

its long

what to do now? in these kinds of problems?

please explain in a way someone that hasn't used linux before would understand

Hi linuxhard here is my suggestion:

Open the Terminal application.
Copy & paste the following commands into the Terminal. These commands do the same thing as clicking the Update button, except they will give more detailed output:

Copy and paste the full output of these Terminal commands into your reply here on LinuxQuestions. Use "code" tags for legibility!

There is no test really. You seem to have a few issues really. What do you want to try to solve first?

sudo apt update may provide some clues. Once in a while the update is stuck and you have to clear it. Forget that command but part of apt man pages.

cant open the terminal at this point

have that startup error that was mentioned

w/e you think is best

i think that would be the startup error, i dunno anything about computers, so not sure

To clarify: Are you saying that your Linux Mint system won't boot at all and is totally unusable? Is there important data on the hard drive you need to recover? If so, let's stop and back up your data before we go any farther. One way to do this is to boot a Linux Mint Live USB, and while you are running in Live mode, copy the files from your internal hard drive to a backup device(s) such as an external hard drive or cloud/network storage.

So you say your issue is that the computer won't update but you can't test any solutions because you have a startup error.

Hmmm. Seems to me the more pressing issue here is the startup error if it's preventing you from, you know, starting the computer. Without being able to do that, how are you able to tell you have an update error?

means it isn't able to find a disk that it is expecting to be present at boot time.

If you can identify that disk, you can boot your live usb install media, mount the / (root) partition of the installation and edit your /etc/fstab to either not wait for that disk on boot if it isn't necessary to boot, or fix whatever issue is preventing it from mounting on boot

how to do that?

also how to just boot from hard drive like it did in the past?

i dont understand, what do you mean?

that was yesterday

this is today, it start up, got error

i dunno, w/e the error tells, what does it tell you?

someone say its something about some disk

i dont understand why it randomly does not 'boot' from hard drive like before today....

but anyway, it would be simpler to just 'boot' from hard drive

remember please explain in a way that someone who hasn't used linux before would understand

that.

really really really really sucks...

what to do now...

Your Linux Mint is broken. Maybe you can fix it.

Do you have important data that you need to recover from the computer? Do you have a backup of all your important files? Is Linux Mint the only operating system on your computer, or do you have other operating systems (like Windows, too)?

Do you have a Linux Mint Live USB or Live DVD? If not, time to make one!