[gentoo-user] Kernel crash - howto find out what happened?

[Alexander Puchmayr]

Hi there!

MY gentoo system (an amd64@4400+, 2GB ram, nforce4-chipset) worked fine for 
nearly two years, but now it frequently freezes, sometimes (not always) 
scrollock and capslock LED blinking).

Since I'm using the box as desktop, I have only a frozen X-server and no 
possibility to switch to console (maybe there's some hint whats happened?).

How do I find out what happened, why it crashed? Modern systems have 
MCE-logs, but how do I read it in this case? After reboot, all information 
seems to be gone since mcelog is always empty.

I assume there's some problem with some hardware, I already tested RAM with 
memtest86, but no errors. 

Thanks for suggestions
    Alex