Ok. Here's the thing. My dads' hard drive went up a while back. So we got him a new one and installed Ubuntu 9.10 instead of windows. All was going well until About two weeks ago. The system restarts randomly. Not when anyone is doing anything in particular. Sometimes when we are using firefox, sometimes just sitting on the desktop, and never after any certain amount of time.Some times its after five minutes, some times after several hours. It's not a full out crash, the window for shutdown/switch user/restart comes up out of nowhere. When we close the window, it shows back up pretty quickly, but then the computer will just crash. While restarting, half of the time the computer won't make it past the bios screen before restarting again,and will continue the bios restarting cycle until the computer is unplugged. By the way, the system is a dell dimension E310 from 2005 with all of the original hardware minus hard drive inside, so if it is a hardware issue that wouldn't surprise me. Also, just one time after the restart I received the message "fsck from util-linux-ng 2.16" , if that helps at all. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

"Also, just one time after the restart I received the massage" LOL!
Would be nice to get a massage every time my fathers computer goes belly up!

I think you're looking at a hardware issue here.
Did you go into the BIOS and ran the diagnostics, like memory checks and so on?

Maybe there's a ACPI incompatibility, did you check google if the E310 has know issues?
You might wanna check if there's a BIOS upgrade for the machine.

Let us know how you did!

You're using kernel version 9.10?! OH MY GOD, HE'S FROM THE FUTURE!!!!!
Note: the proper term is "Ubuntu 9.10".

michealharr,

Verify 1. make sure you have the right version of the linux you have installed. e.g. if you wanna install ubuntu you may check this list of hardware http://webapps.ubuntu.com/certification/ for the right version of ubuntu to install

2. maybe there is overheating of your CPU/memory chips/harddrive verify whether fans are working properly

3. may be the memory chips are gone try installing a different set of memory stick

Ram

Now the computer won't stay on long enough to run diagnostics.

I checked google, but couldn't come up with anything. There is a bios update, but I am afraid to attempt it, as the computer won't stay on for long and I don't want to mess something up.

After I attempted to do the diagnostics and it shut down, It wouldn't start at all for about a half hour or so. When it did start it did so on it's own, I didn't press anything. Then it crashed again without making it past the bios screen.

michealharr,

Pull out the existing memory stick and put some other working memory stick and try booting

Ram

And give everything on the motherboard a good press down.
This is with the power cord pulled OUT of course!