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I had a stable Debian 6 install until earlier today, when some keys on my USB keyboard stopped working and my USB mouse buttons started to behave strangely. I had not installed anything new since the last time I shutdown my computer.

I ran sudo reboot, left to check on something else, then came back to see a screen like the following:

[nnnn.nn] not responding
[nnnn.nn] not responding

... where the ns were numbers (I don't know if the decimal point was always placed at the same spot). After a few seconds, my computer restarted.

This would happen every time after I got to the GRUB screen and selected Debian.

Is there any way to fix this?

Thanks.

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Do you get the same errors with the fallback image? Can you boot from another medium and check your logs? – jasonwryan Sep 6 '12 at 6:03
nnnn.nn is the time since boot. What would be useful is the messages before “not responding” starts beind spammed. Press Ctrl+S to pause the display, Ctrl+Q to resume. Also run a memory test, strange symptoms like this are sometimes the cause of RAM going bad. – Gilles Sep 6 '12 at 21:15
Hm, today the computer started working perfectly fine again. @Gilles, would this mean the RAM is going bad, and if so, even though the computer works fine, should I replace my RAM? – Jonathan Chan Sep 7 '12 at 2:10
@JonathanChan With the symptoms you've seen so far, it could be just about any piece of hardware that's failing (including a loose wire somewhere). There are sure signs of RAM failure, but they involve data corruption, so it's better not to get them. I recommend running a memory test overnight anyway. – Gilles Sep 7 '12 at 2:17

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