Recovering from a hard X lock up

[James Allsopp]

Tim wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-10 at 15:10 +0100, James Allsopp wrote:
>> I'll try the kill X next time, but last time I did that it
>> seemed to corrupt my boot partition and I had to use a rescue disk.
> 
> That sounds like there's something seriously screwy with your system if
> killing X can screw up a partition that's not even being used (boot is
> practically ignored, once you've booted up).
> 
>> TBH, my system is getting increasingly unstable (1 hard lock up per
>> day). I'm going to try and memtest, see how it gets on with a couple
>> of hours unreal tournament in windows to check the hardware, and if
>> that doesn't work I'll try upgrading to F11. If that doesn't work, new
>> re-install time, but I've not really got the time for that.
> 
> Check cooling (stuck fans, blocked fans, heatsinks full of dust,
> heatsinks not well attached to hot parts).
> 
> Check the power supply (harder to do if you're non-technical), and that
> it's adequate for your hardware.  If you've been adding things, you may
> have added too much.
> 
> You could have flakey hardware, or flakey drivers for specific hardware.
> You could leave the computer running in run level 3, doing some hard
> work, to try and eliminate the graphics hardware.
> 

I'm going to check the cooling tonight. I'm running an old nvidia FX5200
card with the legacy nvidia drivers.

Thanks for the suggestions,
James