[TAG] Diagnosing a Linux crash

[Tom Brown]

Karl,

    Thanks for the input, but I think you're giving me a lot more credit 
than I deserve. A lot of your suggestions went over my head. Learning to 
install and configure Linux is one thing. Learning how to do an autopsy 
seems to be quite another!

| hunt down all info of the last crash (logfiles, register dump,...)

Yes, well, I looked at the messages log, but saw only a gap time-wise between cron processing around 4 in the morning, and the time of the crash. I'm not sure which of the other logs are important in that case. Where do I find the register dump (although I suspect it won't make much sense to me, rather like those register dumps you get in Windows XP)? 

| File server? What hardware?

Two regular IDE drives: one 20GB and one 250GB, so SCSI shouldn't be an 
issue.

I'm going to keep your response handy -- several things to try. 
Meantime, I realized I was booting the thing into runlevel 5 (rather 
stupid, actually), so I've since changed it to 3. If it is, as someone 
suggested, a framebuffer problem, maybe that will solve it for now. I'm 
using a real old Voodoo 3 card I scrounged from my parts bin. If it 
happens again, I'll have to tear the machine apart and start playing 
with the memory, as someone else here suggested.

Thanks.

Tom