Frequent hangs/failed boots on Ubuntu 12.04 with SSD 330

[idata]

I have an Intel 330 240gb SSD with Ubuntu 12.04 installed on it. For the first few weeks I had no problems, but since then I've had frequent (multiple times daily) hangs and failed boots. I'll just be doing any old thing on my laptop (don't even have to be doing anything really) and the drive will simply stop responding. The activity LED stays on indefinitely and the drive never responds until I reboot (assuming I can). I can still move the mouse and click (some) things, but anything that wants to access the drive wont work. When I go to my tty terminal with ctrl+alt+F2 and try to log in, this prints out:

http://www.imgjoe.com/?v=201212251500.jpg 201212251500.jpg at imgJoe - Free Image Hosting Made Simple

Also, sometimes when I start my laptop I will get to the GRUB boot selection menu, and a second or so after selecting an OS it will hang and stop booting. Same symptoms as above, LED stays on and no activity. The weird thing is that I can ALWAYS get to the GRUB menu which requires reading from the disk.... but it only freezes after I select an OS.

Any help is greatly appreciated, as I'm pretty clueless as to what to do. This is incredibly frustrating since it happens so frequently, making my laptop rather unpleasant to use.

My laptop is an HP DV6227CL. It's about 6 years old and only running a Sata 1 interface, but I doubt that has much to do with it.

[idata]

There is ONE thing I do EVERY time ANYTHING in Linux fails!!!!!!!!!!

Memtest86!!!!

Linux is normally very very easy on a RAM failures... A dead bit of ram, and it just does odd things now and then. Windows usually dies very quickly if any hardware fails... But Linux is very forgiving...

Run MEMTEST86 for sure and be sure that nothing in RAM has not failed. I have several machines that must bust RAM pretty hard and every now and then Linux burps and it traces right to failed RAM...

Check that RAM first for sure!!! In all cases, except when a video card blew up once, this random boot stuff was all a bad RAM stick. And MEMTEST finds it in the first seconds... Windows runs for a day or two, Linux can run for weeks or months with dead RAM... That is why almost all version of Linux include MEMTEST right up front and suggest you use it often!!!