Crashed X - Hard re-boot

Running Sarge 3.1r5 (all up to date), kernel 2.4.27-2-386 and Gnome desktop.

The following situation is repeatable, behaving in the same manner each time:

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Running Gnome in terminal 1 as normally privileged user. Initialized
by startx.

Switch to terminal 2 (CTRL ALT F2) and log in as same user as in
terminal 1. No commands issued in terminal 2.

Switch back terminal 1 (CTRL ALT F1), and X has crashed. Gnome is
gone, and the screen shows a few lines of "GetModeLine _scr:0
clock:0 and sometimes GetGrabKeysState _enabled.

X will not respond to CTRL ALT BACKSPACE (which normally closes the
server). The screen will accept only enter (scrolls down one line for
each press of the ENTER key).
There is a flashing cursor at the bottom left of the display.

The only workable recovery I have found is to switch to terminal 2, su
to root, and to
shutdown -h now. Normal shutdown occurs, power goes off, everything quiet.

A hard re-boot - power on - (ouch!) brings back the system with
everything working as normal.

How do I recover "gracefully" from an X crash like this? Anybody have
an idea what is going on? Where can I look for diagnostics?

Following is the last few lines from var/log/XFree86.0.log

GetModeLine - scrn: 0 clock: 0
GetModeLine - hdsp: 1024 hbeg: 0 hend: 0 httl: 0
vdsp: 768 vbeg: 0 vend: 0 vttl: 0 flags: 0
(WW) I810(0): Setting the original video mode instead of restoring
the saved state
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 7
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 0
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 2
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 1
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 3
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 4
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 5
(II) I810(0): xf86UnbindGARTMemory: unbind key 6
(II) I810(0): [drm] removed 1 reserved context for kernel
(II) I810(0): [drm] unmapping 8192 bytes of SAREA 0xe0261000 at 0x40018000

Thanks all
Dave W.


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