I have a toshiba laptop with an amd turion dual core zm80. I have Slackware 12.0 on it. It has an ati graphics card. I setup /etc/inittab to boot to init 4 by default. It's been working great. The computer boots up to the desktop as a normal user, not root. However, sometimes, when the desktop barely boots, I move the mouse cursor and it freezes. I simply do a hard power off by holding the power button, then retry. I noticed that if I don't move the mouse cursor at all until the desktop boots and makes the welcome tune, it works fine. However, the other day, I had to hard power off and then when it restarted slackware got stuck at "starting x11 session manager".

So at LILO I hit TAB and appended init 3. So I log in as root. Then I try startx and I get

Fatal server error:
Cannot open log file "/var/log/Xorg.0.log"

giving up.
xinit: Input/output error (errno 5): unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error

I tried moving Xorg.0.log.old to Xorg.0.log but I get

mv: accessing 'Xorg.0.log' : Input/output error


Anybody know what's going on? I've tried running

aticonfig -v --initial --output=/etc/X11/xorg.conf

and it runs successfully but makes no change. Any ideas?

Is this a hard drive error? I can still create files on this partition.

Fixed. I checked out /var/log/dmesg and found that the kernel recommended running e2fsck so I booted up a live distro, made sure the partition was not mounted and ran e2fsck on the partition and fixed all the errors. Works great now. I guess hard powering off can create errors in the partition.

What else can I do when the desktop freezes and nothing else works? How can I reboot?

if a desktop freezes, first try hitting ctl-alt-backspace (not to be confused with ctl-alt-delete) to restart the x server
if not try hitting ctl-alt-f1 to switch to a text mode login and hitting ctl-alt delete to reboot
alternatively if you have openssh server running and another computer you can try sshing into the machine and issuing the reboot command remotely

Awesome, thanks tons.