Spontaneous unclean reboots

It started happening in X, with the Opera browser, the other day. I would open
the latter, and then get a black screen, because the system was rebooting, with
the file systems uncleanly unmounted. Then, in the rebooting process, because
the file systems were uncleanly unmounted, fsck would be run--it would exit
with *failed* after checking the root file system and correcting some errors,
demanding that the system be rebooted. After this reboot fsck would proceed to
check my home partition and give the following message:

/dev/hda7: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY. (i.e., without -a or
-p options) fsck died with exit status 4

I would run fsck manually (from the provided root shell), saying "y" to all the
questions, which were not numerous (4 or 5). But every time I tried to run
Opera, the problem would reproduce itself. I cleverly stopped running Opera.

Now today, I booted normally, logged in, and when I did my habitual "startx",
the system rebooted spontaneously, and uncleanly. fsck corrected errors on my
/, exiting with a *failed* and rebooting the computer. After rebooting, fsck
checked my home partition (/dev/hda7), and I got this message:

[sbin/fsck.ext2 (1) -- /home] fsck.ext2 -a -C0 /dev/hda7 /dev/hda7 was not
cleanly unmounted, check forced. /dev/hda7: Entry '.serverauth.2507' in /curty
(31873) has deleted/unused inode 32050. CLEARED. /dev/hda7: Unattached inode
32147

/dev/hda7: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY. (i.e., without -a or
-p options) fsck died with exit status 4

I ran fsck manually once again.

I wonder if something's dying, as in hardware failure. I'm running Debian Etch
on an ext2 file system. My machine is eight years old. There's stuff in lost
and found--from the Opera crashes, an index.ini Opera mail file; from the X
crash, what looks to be the .serverauth.2507 file. Then there's one simple
text file that belongs to me that was recovered from one of the crashes--I
don't know which one. I don't see anything in /var/log/syslog that seems
relevant to these crashes.

Anything to be done to confirm the hypothesis above, or to formulate a
diagnosis?
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... the file systems uncleanly unmounted. ... Then, in the rebooting process, because ... After this reboot fsck would proceed to ... Opera, ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... was rebooting, with the file systems uncleanly unmounted. ... After this reboot fsck would proceed to check my home ... tried to run Opera, ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... You need to boot with any Linux liveCD, so system's / partition will ... not be mounted or in use, and run fsck on it. ... Did you run a checksum on the Opera download before installing it? ...
    (alt.os.linux)
  • Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots
    ... I would still fsck / just to make sure there are no errors, ... Did you run a checksum on the Opera download before installing it? ... It's the same stock debian kernel 2.6.18-4-686. ...
    (alt.os.linux)