Last night my system, running Mandrake 10.1, crashed.

I wasn't there to observe the event, only the consequences. I had a black screen, and switching between virtual consoles was inneffective (so it wasn't just X). Then I tried an ssh connection from another machine on the network. No luck. Even pinging didn't generate a response.

I rebooted the machine (with the power-switch ... ugh) and checked the logs (/var/log/messages and /var/log/syslog), but there was no information that explained why this had happened. Foolishly, I didn't force a file-system integrity check during boot-up.

I've not had such a problem with a Linux system before. Obviously it shouldn't happen and I'm worried about hardware failure. I'd appreciate ideas on:

1) determining what caused this,
2) testing my hardware for possible imminent failure,
3) doing a file-system integrity check now, and
4) general advice/comments on crashes like this one.

Thanks.

Nobody has answered and you are probably waiting so Ill have a shot with what I can and somebody else might come along and take over.

This seems silly but the easiest way I have found to do a file system check is to close all applications and switch the thing off.
Switch back on and take the option to check the file system
Somebody might tell me exactly what damage they think this will do if they disagree with this . I do it often.

The alternative is to enter a teminal ¨and su -¨
unmount the drive you want to check
and fsck the drive
type man umount and man fsck for details

The rest I can´t help with

The above advice sounds like a good place to start, and I wish I could be of more help, but had lots of problems with 10.1 as did others, and finally ditched it. I think they were in the process of changing USB modules,udev, KDE, and some other stuff and just rushed it out the door.

10.0 was solid and am now using 2005LE (10.2) which is solid.

good luck