Re: Interupting make, causing my machine to lock up?

[J. Grant]

You might like to try with -d option to see if that reveals which
process is causing the problem.

it sounds as though a process is not handling SIGTERM (Ctrl+C)
correctly. (that means "die now"). You could try sending SIGINT ("please
die") which requests your process to exit as fast as it can.  I think
SIGTERM may actually be the OS shutting down the process.

I doubt this is a problem in GNU Make though.  You might like to try
memtest86, and check all your other hardware components are working
correctly.

Kind regards
JG