[Nottingham] My Linux broke

[Rennacker Ed]

Never had that (this) happen before, being I am a long time Linux user, 
but a very ordinary one at that. But for several years and this is the 
first time I've had a "crash". My Gui went blank and I kept looping, 
after several minutes of HDD activity, to the login screen.

===System: SuSe10.2 on a bog std. SiS box
===Background: I've had lots of rebuilds on this machine which is almost 
3 years old. It's even been to a fix-it night. It was born with Linspire 
and has had several Linux installs. The last couple of months it has 
been a file server w/ SMB. It just runs all the time and a few times a 
week I get on to surf the web, use Linux.
===The Issue: I turned on the monitor last night and everything looked 
normal, but the browser wasn't responding. So I did the Yast network 
check (it's usually my BT hub) which ran OK. I then opened a terminal to 
do some checks and ...

1) There was a Xterm window WITH NO BASH PROMPT (caps mean 1st clue). 
Could type, had cursor. Eventually a prompt appeared, but I was on to 
something else by then and I don't think bash was working anyway.
2)Tried to log off and ended at a blank screen. After several minutes 
the Suse splash/login appeared. (rinse, repeat)
3)Enter login details and again the blank screen, wait 4-5 minutes while 
the HDD runs and back to the splash/login. So I used the 'session' 
function to try failsafe mode. which is full screen text mode login, but 
the same thing happens: pause of several minutes; login screen.
I was tired, I gave up and went to bed. It is now morning and I am 
thinking Xserver. Why? because when in full screen text mode I remember 
seeing a line: Run level 5 ---- done, but I was in rc.d 3 or 2 or 1, ? 
Like I said my gui terminals had no prompts and when I was at text mode 
I never used chkconfig or anything clever, I'm not very clever with Linux.
Thanks for listening.
Edward