Debian Box Dying.
 

I am running Debian 6.0. System is an AMD Athlon dual core processor on an ASRock N68C-GS UCC motherboard, 4 gig ram, 500 gig hd.

I have had it for a few months and it has never been right. It has recently taken a turn for the worst locking up after running for only a few minutes.

I swapped in a different hard drive with the same results.

It appears to be running but when I try to open an app in Gnome it says "Could not launch menu item, Failed to execute child process... (input/output error)"

Also, if I go to a terminal console and try to log on it just does nothing but grind for a bit and then go back to the prompt.

I can not even log out, have to power down.

Where should I start in trying to isolate this problem?

When I restart I can get into a console and check /var/log/messages, etc.

Thanks,
JP.

I would start by testing the hardware. This could easily be a
problem with a cpu overheating or some kind of memory errors.

Start by getting a system rescue cd and run memtest86. Let it run
for a couple of hours and see if you get any memory errors. If you
still don't see any errors, try booting normally and check the output
of "cat /proc/acpi/thermal_zone/*/temperature" to see if any of the
temperatures go up.

If it still fails, take the case apart and reseat all the chips,
cables and memory sticks. Check the fans while you have it open.

Reseated everything, cleaned heat sink, new heat sink compound, re-assembled and 50 hrs of run now with no problems.

Very cool. Thanks for the update. It's great to know that it works.