[PLUG] System hangs

[Richard C. Steffens]

From time to time my system hangs. It's usually when I have an xterm window 
open, along with KMail, and Patience, and then I try to open something else, 
like K3b. When I reset the machine and try running K3b (to burn CD's) as the 
only program I start myself, it works fine.

The system has 192 Mb of RAM (free -m says 186). It has been suggested to me 
that the problem might be a bad spot on the hard drive. I have begun testing, 
but now need advice on how to proceed.

Details:

I started out installing Debian Woody on this machine. I tried upgrading to 
Sarge, but could not get the install to work. I was given a SuSE 9.1 personal 
CD and installed that. However, I didn't notice if there was an option to 
tell the SuSE installer to wipe any partitions it found and do it's own 
thing, and as a result, I have three old ext2 partitions along with the 
reiserfs partition used by SuSE.

The partitioning looks like this, according to the lvm tool in YaST2:

/dev/hda1     /boot       92.0 MB Linux native
/dev/hda5      swap     180.0 MB Linux swap
/dev/hda6        /             3.7 GB Linux native
/dev/hda7                   957.3 MB Linux native
/dev/hda8                     47.6 MB Linux native
/dev/hda9                       2.8 GB Linux native

I have run badblocks on the three ext2 partitions, hda7, hda8, and hda9, and 
found no problems. Now I'm thinking about running badblocks on other 
partitions. I understand that a partition should not be mounted when 
badblocks is run, so I'm trying to figure out how to go about testing the 
swap partition. Should I make use of some of the old ext2 space and create 
another swap partition before proceeding?

Any recommendations on my next step would be appreciated.

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens
http://home.comcast.net/~rsteff/