fedora 6 kernel panic issues

[Alan Cox]

On Mon, 6 Aug 2007 20:29:41 -0700
"Jason Taylor" <jtaylor at uipacific.com> wrote:

> 
> That was all I saw at the console besides the transaction #'s.  
> 
> I was unable to open any virtual terminals or escape it at all.  I will try and see if there is any more data at the end.
> 
> I am still pretty Linux green.  Is there something else that I can provide that would help?
> I ran through /var/log/messages and saw nothing.

Before it choked it will have dumped a set of messages indicating ATA
error information to the system. That may have scrolled off before it
died, and if the disk failed then it couldn't write it to the log either.

Drives keep their own failure information log usually (partly because of
this) and there are low level tools to access the information:

open a terminal window

do

su -
[root password]
smartctl -a -d ata /dev/sda

and it will dump the data for the first disk. 

That will show you various stats including an overall health self
assessment and also usually the last errors that occurred. Those are the
important and useful bit.