Why did my Linux Mint system crash?

[joe at actionline.com]

The mem test ran about an hour and a half and found no problems.

The box was set up as a dual boot with win7 (which I had never used), so
I tried it and it worked. So I tried my Linux Mint 13 Live CD from which
this system was originally installed and it works fine in all respects as
far as I can tell. (I'm writing this note via webmail using the Mint 13
Live CD.

So, it doesn't seem to be a hardware problem. I had made no recent
changes so how could Mint have become messed up?  And how can I repair
it?


--------------
Michael Butash wrote (in part):
> Just let it run a cycle on it ...
> I'd say maybe a few hours on 8-16gb to run all patterns.

---------------
> On 01/14/2014 01:38 PM, joe wrote:
>> I'm running memtest86 now.
>> How long should this run?  Now running about an hour ...

---------------
Matt Graham wrote (in part):
>>> ... 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.)