STAR WARS™ Special Edition Notebook and PCIe Bus error severity=Corrected

A couple of years ago, wife needed a new laptop and bought a new notebook, the "STAR WARS™ Special Edition Notebook" specifically... because "star wars".

You can see the model here: https://www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/HP_Star_Wars_laptop/overview.html

She decided first to use the Windows  OS and later to have dual OS having Windows and GNU/Linux.  Some time later she went full with GNU/Linux distribution.

November 11th - The notebook started to fail at boot, you can imagine that after this time the hard drive could have issues and that's what we confirmed. She'll buy a new hard drive... some time in the future.

November 30, 2019 the future was that day and the 1TB hard drive was dead.

When we had the new hard drive installed and ready, we tried with OpenSuSe but after the installation was done and first boot completed, it felt "slow" and we considered it was too much for this laptop and we decided to try with Mint.

Again after the installation was done and session started after some minutes the system hang, this time I went to one of the terminals just to find a lot of lines reporting

"PCIe Bus Error: severity=Corrected....."

Restarting was not working because as the system came up, it hang. As she didn't have time to research why this was happening I re-installed again using Ubuntu this time.

And once again, after installation/session started... randomly was hanging/freezing, went to check again the terminal and the "PCIe Bus Error...." message again.

This time I opted to do search why this was happening and the answer was found here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/771899/pcie-bus-error-severity-corrected

"Try this,

Use this link ( about the adding paramter to kernel here) to understand about adding kernel boot paramter temporarily and making it permanent. Then,

Add the parameter , pci=nomsi

And reboot.

If the problem is solved then make the change permanent. If does not work then try,

pci=noaer

same way and make it permanent if this works.

(*Reason for appearance is related to the recent Intel Skylake architecture CPUs and Realtek rtl8723be wireless adaptor.

The ubuntu team knows about it. Read more here Bug_track_ubuntu_PCIe bus error ) "

Nice...  so... how do we make this permanent?

The answer is here: https://askubuntu.com/questions/19486/how-do-i-add-a-kernel-boot-parameter

"To temporarily add a boot parameter to a kernel:

1. Start your system and wait for the GRUB menu to show (if you don't see a GRUB menu, press and hold the left Shift key right after starting the system).
2. Now highlight the kernel you want to use, and press the e key. You should be able to see and edit the commands associated with the highlighted kernel.
3. Go down to the line starting with linux and add your parameter foo=bar to its end.
4. Now press Ctrl + x to boot.

To make this change permanent:

1. From a terminal (or after pressing Alt + F2) run:

   gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub
   

   (or use sudo nano if gksudo or gedit are not available) and enter your password.

2. Find the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and append foo=bar to its end. For example:

   GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash foo=bar"
   

   Save the file and close the editor.

3. Finally, start a terminal and run:

   sudo update-grub
   

   to update GRUB's configuration file (you probably need to enter your password).

On the next reboot, the kernel should be started with the boot parameter. To permanently remove it, simply remove the parameter from GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT and run sudo update-grub again.

To verify your changes, you can see exactly what parameters your kernel booted with by executing cat /proc/cmdline.

Wiki Page:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootOptions"

After these changes were applied, the notebook worked like a charm... I wanted to go back and try OpenSuse/Mint but she had to keep working.

Who knows.. maybe in the future  ;-)