I'm experiencing some serious problems with Ubuntu 14.10 for a while.
Everything was working fine for a few months on version 15.04, after which my system just started crashing out of nowhere, by what was caused by some GUI problem; the taskbar was disappearing, after which every program would freeze.
Rebooting would then give me the error 'ACPI PCC probe failed', sometimes combined with the boot process stopping at the GRUB commandline, or at a prompt which seems to be call 'iniframs'. In the last case I would see some errors like "Target filesystem doesn't have requested /sbin/init. No init found. Try passing init=bootarg".
I reinstalled the whole system to 14.10 using a LiveDisk, after which the problem was gone for a few months, but returned exactly the same last week.
This morning I booted from LiveDisk again, now running BootRepair, which suggested me to share a link whith some logs on this forum.
The logs: http://paste.ubuntu.com/13237424/
On another forum someone advised me to run a filesystem check on the root partition of the installed OS, with the command sudo e2fsck /dev/sdc1. This gave this response:
ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo e2fsck /dev/sdc1
e2fsck 1.42.9 (4-Feb-2014)
/dev/sdc1: recovering journal
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to re-open /dev/sdc1
/dev/sdc1: ********** WARNING: Filesystem still has errors **********
I really hope there is someone who can help me, since this makes my desktop totally useless, even reinstalling the OS doesn't help.
UPDATE December 1, 2015: After buying a new harddisk I experienced exactly the same problems, and I ended up finding someone suggesting me to change the SATA-cable between thye disk and the motherboard.
Guess what, this did the trick. So please, before buying a new disk, check your cable.
Best Answer
I had a laptop with a Samsung hd that started doing this (a crash, and a badblock on the following restart) and the SMART tool still gave an "ok" status.
Try to boot for a live CD or USB and doing a search for bad blocks on the disk/partition affected:
(Warning: it is bound to be a really slow and long thing --- in the hour range). In my case, it listed a couple more. After repair it all worked ok during maybe a couple of weeks, and then I had another one. SMART still saying that the disk was ok.
I replaced the disk (with an SSHD, nice thing!) and now it's all working ok. So my advice is, at the first badblock --- make a backup every day and, at the second badblock, trash the disk and go for a new one.
(BTW - as commented in the question, checking the SATA cable is also worth a shot - random errors in different spots can be a telltale symptom).