I've experienced a problem that is rather strange. I'll try to describe it as best as I can. It's happened twice so far with several weeks to a month between them. It's usually after the system has been left idle for a while but not consistant.
When I move the mouse and the monitor turns back on, I can not access any programs especially any that are run as root. Konqueror, Mandrake Control Center and such. When I click on them it gives me the watch for a mouse pointer for a while then it goes away with the app appearing to die.
The desktop icons are all gone. Floppy, CD, the second data drive and any documents that should be there. All gone. This happened both times.
This time it was a bit worse. The GUI crashed. It tried to restart and gets to initializing services and hangs a bit then goes to a blue screen and sits there. It tries to restart after a while but stops in the same place. I managed to get it to another screen like command line, ctrl +alt+F* keys, but I could not read anything. It was like garbage. I blindly logged in as root and typed in shutdown command. It did shutdown and reboot.
When the system came up it did not report any errors at all. I could not read anything during the shutdown. Sorry.
I did notice the first time it did this that during the shutdown it said some systems were not mounted. I did not understand why they were not. I have never unmounted any hard drive.
If I recall correctly I am using ext3 file system. I have a root partition, a swap partition and a /usr partition if that helps.
It return to normal after I reboot the system. No problems. Everything seems to work fine.
Any body ran into this or have any commands that I can run if it happens again and I can get a terminal to work?

Any ideas at all. mdwatts, help out here if you can. This is weird. It's 'weirder' than me.



Oh, if you need more info let me know. I'll post what you need just let me know how to get it. Really bad cloud here so I may be in the dark for a while if the lights go out. I'll be back though.