I currently have RH 9 installed as a file/internet server for a small home network, everything has been working fine until recently.
I shutdown the system as normal and restarted it the next day, all looked fine and the login gui appeared as normal, I typed the relevent details and the login screen disappeared as normal but then the hard disk just kept accessing and nothing loaded at all (I use Gnome as the default). I rebooted tried again but the same thing happened, I tried booting into KDE which looked like it was working, all the icons appeared but the disk kept spinning and the system was unresponsive, I can log into fail safe ok but I'm unsure what would cause this problem.
No hardware / software changes had been made to the system except for some extra memory added which turned out to be faulty so I removed it.

Any ideas ?

that might be the sign of hard disk failure. when booting window check whether it displays hard disk failure or memory error. run check disk ...

Think the disk is OK as it works fine when I use Run Level 3 instead of 5, just seems to be a problem with the gui side of things, not sure what though

do you see any warning or error messages when booting.

No warning or error messages at all, all the startup sequence goes ok and the login screen appears as normal, its just when starting the GUI no icons appear and the hard drive continually accesses. If I startup in runlevel 3 everything works fine, all the server functions work like samba,squid etc. Just seems to be xwindow related as both Gnome and KDE faill to startup. I've redone the xfree86 configuration but still no joy with the GUI.

are you sure? that your hard drive dont have badsector in it?
if its not your harddrive fault try to reformat that machine and restrore you linux

Positive about the hard drive, I have a win2000 and 98 install on it too and they work fine, just the linux gui.
Think I'll end up reinstalling but would be nice to find out whats causing this.
Thanks for your input

"No hardware / software changes had been made to the system except for some extra memory added which turned out to be faulty so I removed it."

When you removed that faulty memory, how much memory did you have left? Sounds like X windows can't load because of not enough memory and is trying to swap to disk like crazy.
Just a thought.

Its now got the original amount of memory in (256MB), think I'll pull some memory from one of the other machines and swap all the simms out see if that helps matters.

ah well, just fitted a load of RAM (known to be good) and the problem is still there

Think i'll re-install, would have been nice to get to the bottom of it though.

Thanks for your input