[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu Crashing

[Neil Greenwood]

Hi Seif,

On 05/02/2008, Michael Holloway <michael at thedarkwinter.com> wrote:
> A log file that might help you diagnose is /var/log/messages - if there
> is anything interesting in there, post it here and we'll have a look.
>

Something that Michael didn't make clear, just in case you're new to
Linux, is that messages written to /var/log/messages survive past a
reboot, so you don't have to worry about losing anything when you have
to do the hard shutdown.

Another reference that might help is this forum page
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=617349
It describes some key presses you can use to save information to the
disk before doing the hard shutdown/reboot - it helps to stop you
needing to fsck (i.e. check the disk) when you next boot.

One final thing to try: when the machine 'locks up', try swapping to a
virtual terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F1), logging in and typing 'dmesg'. If the
machine isn't totally dead, that might give you some info that would
help debug the problem.

HTH
Hwyl,
Neil.