I have a big problem... I quit X alot since I multiboot for various reasons, and xfree have a tendancy to hang right as the screen has turned black after hitting CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE. This means I have to hit the reset button on the box, and I really dislike to do this. In part because I have some very big harddrives and forcechecking them with fsck ever 5 or so days when I reboot, just doesnt cut it, and also because its generally no good for hardware - and corrupting my filesystem is the LAST thing I would wanna do...

So, does anyone know why this happens? Note that it doesnt happen every time, but its definetely a high ratio... Could it perhaps be Nvidia?

System: Debian, testing.
X version: 4.2.1
Grfx Driver: NViDiA

Why are you using control+alt+backspace? It is really only ment to kill X in case of a really bad lockup, not to be a normal method of dropping out of X.

If your starting X by doing "init 5" then do an "init 3" to get back. If your starting X by typing "startx" then just use the window managers "log out" feature to get back to the cli.

I do a startx, never liked a graphical login screen...

Unfortunately, I get the same result even when I use fluxbox's logout feature... ;/

can you not get to any virtual terminals? like control-alt-F3?

also, maybe you can quick convert those ext2's to ext3's, so they don't
get messed up from your server crashing.