It has been a couple weeks and, so far, so good.īut, what if this second Google account has problems in the future? I left the problematic Google userid in place, again, on the theory that it was occupying the bad disk space.

As I wrote last time, there were just over 200 megabytes worth. On Chrome OS, one user can never see another users files, so I manually copied over the locally stored files using a USB flash drive. Had there been hundreds, the bookmarks could have been exported from the old account to an HTML file using Bookmark Manager and then imported into the new one. There were only a few bookmarks to migrate, so I just re-created them manually. Had they been a Gmail user, I can think of three ways to handle the transition, there are probably even more.įortunately, there weren't any other saved website passwords as those would have to be re-created manually. The Chromebook owner uses EarthLink webmail, so all I had to do there was bookmark the site and tell Chrome to save their password. I created a brand new Google account on the Chromebook and, after verifying that it worked flawlessly, started turning it into a duplicate of the first account. So, another Google account on the same machine might be just fine. If I'm right, the current Google account on the Chromebook is occupying the hard drive space with the problem. The system also felt sluggish, which could be hard drive related. My hunch, again, was that the underlying problem was a hard drive read/write error. Not every problem needs to be fully understood, explained and fixed. Sometimes, however, working around a problem is good enough. There was also a storage_info section of the system report that seems to have hard drive information (above), but again, I could not interpret the data.Ĭlearly, I am in over my head, this was getting me nowhere. And, apparently errors are normal, there were quite a few on a well-behaved Chromebook too. The Chrome system log had lots of errors, but none that I could understand. Next, I poked around the chrome://system output and found multiple log files: eventlog, syslog, chrome_system_log, bios_log and chrome_user_log. Sadly, it was Greek to me and there were no SMART statistics. The list varies based on the operating system and Chrome OS includes one that Windows does not, chrome://drive-internals. I blogged about one that can update Flash ( chrome://components) just last month. To see a full list, enter chrome://chrome-urls in the address bar.

The Chrome browser has lots of internal-use-only URLs. I suspected there was an I/O error and would have loved to see the SMART data from the hard drive, but I don't know how on Chrome OS. This is partially why people stick with their favorite operating system on a new OS, you have to start from scratch when it comes to debugging tools. Then, I removed a couple extensions I was fairly sure the Chromebook owner didn't use, but that didn't help either. The problems started under Chrome OS version 49, but by this time, version 50 had been released. My first reaction was to install bug fixes.

I usually make an image backup before giving away a computer, as protection against just this sort of thing, but there are no image backups of Chrome OS devices. Is it a hardware or software problem? Is there one underlying problem or many?

Install chromium os to hard drive