On Tue, 2017-05-30 at 02:42 +0000, William Mattison wrote:
The fix on Thursday, May 18 did not last. This past Thursday, my workstation again failed to boot. This time, it dropped me into an emergency shell, not the dracut shell. This time, the log file was almost twice as long. But it reported fsck failures again, this time on sda7 rather than sda6. So I tried what my friend did, but with "/dev/sda7" instead of "/dev/sda6" as the command parameter. I spent 30-45 minutes doing nothing but rapidly hitting the 'y' key before the command finally completed. (Apparently, hundreds of i-nodes were corrupted this time.) Then the workstation successfully booted.
I think I spent a week trying to get into BIOS. But I wasn't seeing a BIOS screen before the grub menu showed up. I think it was when I shut down and started up a different way that I finally saw the BIOS screen. I quickly changed the time for the BIOS screen from 2 seconds to 8 seconds. As suggested in this discussion, I checked the voltages and the clock. The voltages looked fine. The clock was about 5 seconds slow compared to my "atomic" clock. I adjusted that. This morning, the clock seemed barely noticeably slow compared to that atomic clock, but by less than a second. So I'm agreeing with your suspicions that the battery is getting low.
Actually, I wouldn't call the BIOS clock being 5 seconds off much to worry about (with regards to the battery). They're not that particularly accurate, to begin with, on a par with a cheap wristwatch. However, if your battery is a few years old, you may as well replace it now that you're in the mood to do so. They do have a finite lifespan.
If the BIOS voltage monitors say the voltages are fine, they probably are. Though they're not always super accurate, either. Software that lets you read these values when the OS is running needs to modify them with correction factors.
Since you talk about many file system errors, and difficulty booting, I'm inclined to point the finger at the main power supply. If it's not up to the task of powering everything, or is randomly glitching, that could cause all sorts of instabilities.
Though, as you're taking things apart. It may well be a good idea to unplug everything, and reconnect, just to exercise the connections (cars, RAM, cables, etc). Cards have a habit of walking out due to thermal changes, or mechanical stress when moving a flimsy case around. Clean any exposed slots (e.g. unused PCIe slots).
I just did this simple search, and there's even videos of how to change the battery, right at the top. Though I don't think much of one person's crude "cut through the cover" technique. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ASUS+Sabertooth+Z77+bios+battery
This seems more sensible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSTTR_WVtx0 long video, but he's done it by 4 minutes in.
Perhaps ASUS thinks that by the time the battery is crapping out, you'll have reached the stage of wanting to buy a newer PC.