Ross does have some of the largest drives (250GB) from memory, so I'd guess that the 16MB of swap space on top of the memory available just isn't cutting it.

Are both drives partitioned with swap space? "fdisk -l" should list it, or "fdisk -l /dev/hda" and "fdisk -l /dev/hdc". I don't have my empeg handy to test.

Turn the swap space on on both drives and see how it goes. "swapon /dev/hdc?" where ? is the partition

The Disk Integrity Check is a sign you need to do the fsck I'm pretty sure too so you're on the right track.