Yes, I agree that your drive is possibly failing. If something important like upstart (init) or even the kernel itself resides on one or more of those bad blocks anything can happen. Kernel panics due to hard drive failure is rare, but I've seen it a couple times. I'm not sure if there is a way to grab the logs from memtest. You can just post if you saw errors or not.
I'm going to go ahead and close out this bug for now. If you get this problem again on good hardware don't hesitate to open another bug report. Thank you for the update! ** Changed in: ubuntu Status: Incomplete => Invalid -- Jaunty 'randomly' freezes with flashing/blinking Caps Lock on Acer Aspire 6920G https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/384147 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs