I was running Ubuntu version 16 with three drives: the system drive was a magnetic internal hard drive, there was a solid-state internal drive and an external, USB-connected magnetic drive.
About a week ago, the file systems on all three drives got corrupted. I never found the cause. I reformatted the drives and installed Ubuntu 20.04 and reconstructed the contents of the file system on the system drive. When I rebooted today, it sent into grub. Using ls to examine the drives, there was no ext4 file system. I can only conclude that the file systems were again corrupted.
So my question is, is there any remaining possibility that the cause could be in software or is it necessarily the drives or a controller?
The second question, which might be out of scope for this forum, would be how to test the hardware.
121 Answer
Rebuilding grub.cfg did not help and trying to fix the UUID for my EFI partition also did not work. However, the fix here, which rebuilds more of the boot information or the boot partition, resulted in a successful repair.
