BIOS reset caused ubuntu lockups

My apologies for creating yet another support thread, but I know of nowhere else to turn, and would greatly appreciate any constructive advice.

The summer before last, I installed ubuntu onto my computer, onto a second hard drive.  It ran well and I was enjoying my first experience with a non-windows operating system.  Then after about a month and a half, my neighborhood experienced a very short power outage, and as I have no UPS, my system promptly cut off when it happened.

When the power came back on and I turned on the computer, I got an error from the BIOS saying that the computer could not start up, and was prompted to reset my BIOS settings.  I selected yes, and it restarted and booted up fine.  But ever since then, ubuntu has had the happen of completely freezing up from time to time.  Can't restart X or anything, the only thing that seems to work is the NumLock key and SysRq commands.  Happens on both installations and live CDs, on various versions of ubuntu.

I should probably point out that I received my computer a few years ago as a gift, and have no idea what the BIOS settings were before the reset.  Windows works fine, so I've mostly just ignored the problem until now, but I'd really like to start using it again.

So, anyone have any idea how I would go about solving this problem?

I would try the following things (as they come to mind, no particular order):

- Look at the log files (esp. /var/log/messages) at the exact time the freeze occurred, maybe up to a few minutes before that. Note anything that seems strange. Of course it helps if you have taken a look at your logs in the past so that you can notice unusual messages much easier. If you find anything suspicious, google it and post it here. Might give an indication of what the problem is.

- Go into your BIOS settings. There should be at least one, maybe two "restore to default" options. If you see two (usually "factory defaults" and "(fail)safe defaults" or the like), try to set it to the safe defaults. If not, just use the normal defaults. Maybe something went wrong when you first reset your BIOS. Of course it would be best if you fine tuned all the options in your BIOS to optimum values but you'd have to know your hardware very well for that, so that's probably not an option. Try to find out the RAM specifics at least, those options are important.

- Do the crashes only happen while running X? Try working on the console (not XTerm, the real console), even better, shut down X completely. Look in the documentation, how to do it. Don't just leave it running, try to work with it, give it some load, etc. If it won't crash, the issue might be related to the video card (BIOS settings and/or video driver for X).

- Sad but true, you might be dealing with faulty hardware. Linux uses your system differently than Windows, so it might trigger a hardware fault that didn't get triggered in Windows (yet).


Will post more if I can think of anything else.