Re: Spontaneous unclean reboots

Assuming it is actually hardware for the moment, though I'm still not
absolutely and entirely convinced, I've compiled a checklist here,
though I think you've done some of it already ...
http://tinyurl.com/6nmrtp
.... standing in for ...
http://www.cemh.eclipse.co.uk/JavaJive/PCHardware/HardwareFaults/HardwareFaults.html

Given that your tale of woes features graphics quite a lot, perhaps
that might be a good place to start? Is the graphics card seated
firmly and cleanly? Or with the cycles of thermal expansion and
contraction with being switched on and off has it worked loose, or has
dust got down between the slot's and the card's contacts leading to
imperfect connection? Is dust caked on a the card's heatsink causing
it to overheat?

On 20 Sep 2008 11:57:06 GMT, Curt <curty@xxxxxxx> wrote:

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?
.

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