hmmm... my athlon64 hung last night. hard lockup, had to powerfail it.
of course the screensaver was in powersave mode (kde) so I dunno what
the desktop looked like.

syslog has nothing, and messages has:

Oct 25 01:48:27 athlin1 -- MARK --
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@ ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@ ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@
^@^@^@^@Oct 25 07:37:00 athlin1 syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Oct 25 07:37:01 athlin1 kernel: klogd 1.4.1, log source = /proc/kmsg
started.

all that was running was a kde desktop with a console session doing a
copy to a usb hard drive (IDE drive in removable case) via a smb mount...

the box is about 6 months old and this is probably the first time it's
ever done that.

I'm more annoyed than anything.. is there anything else I can check (dumps?)

I'm not used to troubleshooting failures on Linux boxes... it could be
hardware, but I dunno, and this box hasn't had a history of that and
other than the USB drive it's unchanged in months.

Ray