[techtalk] Redhat Linux 7 Crashes

[Lothan]

I'm at my wits end trying to figure out a bizarre problem with Redhat 7 and
hope someone can offer some guidance. I originally installed Redhat 7 from
scratch (reformatting the entire drive with pure Linux partitions) and it
ran for about three months pretty much continuously without any problems. I
don't shutdown or reboot very often. One night I couldn't connect to the net
so I shutdown the computer from the Gnome menus. During the shutdown process
I noticed a message something along the lines of "hdb is busy" but it
continued to shutdown. Upon reboot most of the /dev directory was fairly
well trashed.

What's so strange to me is that this has happened four times and it doesn't
matter if I leave it running continuously or shutdown every night. Seemingly
at random I'll get "hdb is busy" during shutdown and the drive will be
trashed upon reboot. At first I thought it might be the NIC since one
symptom is that I always loose connection to the net when it happens.
Unfortunately replacing the NIC hasn't helped. I also swapped hard drives
with another computer and installed a new video card. That rules out
everything except the motherboard. Even more puzzling is that it has been
running Windows 2000 for the past three weeks without any problems.

The only other possibility I can think of is that I boot directly to X/Gnome
with Redhat 7 whereas I was booting to console with Redhat 6.