[gentoo-user] Sometimes she boots, sometimes she doesnt. Or sometimes she dies..

[Leonard Bernstein]

Sometimes she boots, sometimes she doesn't. Or sometimes she dies.. Hello list i have had a strange problem regarding booting .. sometimes it will lock up at *starting local...     [ok]  (local is the last thing to start and stay there... now sshd starts before local, so i can ssh to the box, however; many cads are not available.. ps aux net and trying to start services from /etc/init.d also, mail wont work, and who knows whatelse... i have removed many things from the run levels and it didn't seem to make any difference .. then.. sometimes none of this is a problem .. its a difficult problem to me because i don't know how to troubleshoot this here .. and the power often goes out for about 2 seconds here . and at reboot if its not one of those times, it will not boot fully . this is not a new install/system .. i have made no major changes to the system, but it has been a while since rebooting yesterday .. and identifying that there was a problem ..   There are also sometimes where the whole box will slowly die.. and no commands can be performed.. the loadaverage goes up. i was told this could be a runaway process, but i was able to do a 'top' to see what the problem is, so i was able to get a clean reboot, so i have top running, and looking to see what will happen .. is there anything i can try to justify what the cause of the problem is? thanks ..