I’ve revived a Dell Venue battery the laptop reported as dead. Connecting several alkaline batteries in series to provide a voltage slightly higher than the Dell battery’s rated voltage and using them charge the Li-ion battery did the trick. After charging the Dell battery for about 10 minutes I reinstalled it, the laptop recognized it and it worked normally from that point on.
It could happen with anything, but since Mint 17.3 (2015) the only serious corruption I’ve experienced is during a major OS upgrade. I had far more problems with Windows.
Great guidance here and I know you want to stick with Ubuntu, but but if you tire of trying to fix it try a different distro before you give up.
Lots of people swear by Ubuntu, but for others (like me) it’s nothing but trouble. For instance, I get errors when running the latest version of Ubuntu on a current laptop that runs Debian 12 perfectly, and a previous Ubuntu load on one of our laptops (tried with a new SSD) had so many issues that I gave up and restored the Mint backup.
By contrast, we have 2 different laptops and one old desktop that run Linux Mint almost flawlessly. “Almost” means a system lock up every 3-4 months and the inability to wake from sleep for the desktop. Debian 12 was a bit more difficult to get fully working, but since the initial install it has been been completely stable with zero problems. We have one laptop that is running Windows 11 and it has more problems than any of the Linux machines.
Fixing problems is a great way to learn, but if it’s not the way you want to spend your time you may be heading down the wrong path. Unless you have a hardware issue you should be able to find a distro that has few or none of the problems you’ve been fighting.
Had a backup so it was not a big deal. Only one major issue in a decade is more than reliable enough IMO.