Dapper system crashes during compile after update

[Fremont_Cunningham]

I have a Dapper system that has been working well for 3 months, The system is on auto-update. uname -a :
Linux grubby 2.6.15-28-386 #1 PREEMPT Tue Mar 13 20:49:31 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
This system is used to colpile a huge application - takes around 3 hours (SL client) - and has been working well until yesterday, when an update arrived. I allowed the update install.

Since then any compile is crashing at about 1 hour into compile. First the screen goes blank and the kb unresponsive, though the disk runs like the compile is proceeding. After 5 to 10 minutes the machine shuts down.

On normal reboot it dies at 'Mounting Root Filesystem' - the screen goes corrupted and then blank.

Booting in recovery mode produces a ton of messages, A possible interesting one is something like 'INFO recovery required on root filesystem.' Recovery runs,,, I exit at the prompt and get a good login screen. I can then shut down and reboot normally ok.

I have been through this compile-crash-recovery loop several times now, it is 100% reproducable. I am suspecting that yesterday's update changed something critical. That update was probably distributed on May 19th 2007, but *may* have been released in the previous week. On the evening of the 18th the machine did compiles well, and no update had been presented.

What I lack is the knowledge of where in Ubuntu to trace the cause of the crash, or recovery, or what that update was and possibly how to roll it back.

Help please?

Fremont Cunningham.

[mthaddon]

Do you have a log of the application compliation? At what point is it failing? Is there any error message?