# Xorg/GNOME/Compiz went black



## micski (Oct 9, 2013)

I was watching an HTML5 video in Chromium, when the monitors suddenly went black. There was no response from keyboard or mouse. I went to the shell by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. I could see, that Chromium had core dumped. I could also see, that X.Org and Compiz were consuming close to all CPU.

In this situation a reboot is probably the best. However, I was running virtual machines in VirtualBox as well. I would like to close these properly before the reboot. How can I get in contact with VirtualBox, and other programs, in a situation like this? I ended up signaling a hang up to Xorg. This resulted in a fresh login screen. However, all programs seemed to have been lost. The logs were not helpful. I looked in the system log and X.Org log.


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## freesbies (Oct 9, 2013)

That seems an overclock issue to me. Did you overclock your computer?


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## micski (Oct 17, 2013)

The computer is a standard Gigabyte motherboard with default settings for the Intel CPU. I could be RAM related though. It was running several virtual machines at the time of crash.

Whatever the reason is, is it possible to get in contact with the running programs after such a crash? On a similar note, I have the same problem, if I switch user - while running programs. When I switch back, the desktops are empty, but a program list shows, that they are running somewhere in the dark. How can they get back?


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