Why did my Linux Mint system crash?

[Matt Graham]

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"
> http://www.upquick.com/temp/z1.jpg
> http://www.upquick.com/temp/z2.jpg
> http://www.upquick.com/temp/z3.jpg
> http://www.upquick.com/temp/z4.jpg
> 
> What in the world could the problem be and how can I resurrect my 
> system?
> (PS: I'm writing this message from my laptop. Tried to ssh login to 
> the
> failed system, but no joy.)

An OOPS at 33 seconds and then another OOPS at 52 seconds, both in 
kernel code that should be reasonably stable (network drivers followed 
by nouveau)?  I am not certain, but 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.

The last 2 times I've had things like this happen to desktop systems, 
it's been problems with the motherboard.  This is annoying because the 
motherboard is expensive and a pain to replace.

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