Why did my Linux Mint system crash?

[joe at actionline.com]

Thanks for the suggestions ...

I'm running memtest86 now.
How long should this run?  Now running about an hour ...

I'll check the other suggestions later.

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> On 2014-01-14 11:26, joe at actionline.com wrote:
>> I finally rebooted again, and saw a screen full of messages including
>> "unable to handle kernel paging request"

> ... I think there might be a hardware
> problem somewhere in this machine.
>
> You can attempt to diagnose the problem by booting from a rescue
> system.  If those things fail in a similar manner, it's almost certainly
> a hardware problem.  (If the rescue system works fine, then your Mint
> install is borked, but that seems sort of unlikely.)  Or if a rescue
> system works fine except when you start up a GUI, it's a problem with
> the graphics card.  Or if it works fine until you try to start DHCP,
> it's a problem with the NIC.  The other thing to check is the case and
> airflow--make sure there aren't any dust bunnies blocking the fans or
> anything.  If you suspect the RAM is the problem, the memtest86 option
> on many rescue systems will probably say something if you had bad RAM.