This has happened twice - the first time I didn't figure it out before I lost patience and just wiped the root patition and reinstalled - sometimes I have to learn stuff the hard way 
Scenario: KDE crashes. On reboot X won't start because the root partition is full. fsck and some stronger e2fsck tools all say the partition is okay. 30gb partition with about 4gb of stuff on it so I don't buy it.
Anyway, both times the machine crashed there was an rsync job running that was to an external hard drive. This time I reboot into single-user mode and find that the mount point for my external hard drive is there and it's full of files.
The fix was easy - remove the directory. A 30gb root partition can't hold the 150gb of data on the external hard drive
After that I rebooted and everything ran the way it should. The only thing I can figure is that somehow my backup drive got unmounted while the rsync job was running so rsync created a directory on my root partition and started copying files to it.
Lesson 1. Don't run rsync as root. I knew that but have had some trouble in Karmic with rsync cron jobs and rather than fix the problem I broke the rules so the job would run consistently until I had the time and the inclination to fix it. If I'd run rsync under my own user account a failure wouldn't have had permissions to write to /media in the first place.
Lesson 2. I am not smarter than the filesystem tools that tell me something's not broken.
Now I'm not a power user by any stretch of the imagination but these are rookie mistakes - sometimes I get a little cocky, I guess
I still don't know what caused the target drive to unmount, though. Hardware failure wouldn't be my first choice.
Scenario: KDE crashes. On reboot X won't start because the root partition is full. fsck and some stronger e2fsck tools all say the partition is okay. 30gb partition with about 4gb of stuff on it so I don't buy it.
Anyway, both times the machine crashed there was an rsync job running that was to an external hard drive. This time I reboot into single-user mode and find that the mount point for my external hard drive is there and it's full of files.
The fix was easy - remove the directory. A 30gb root partition can't hold the 150gb of data on the external hard drive
After that I rebooted and everything ran the way it should. The only thing I can figure is that somehow my backup drive got unmounted while the rsync job was running so rsync created a directory on my root partition and started copying files to it.
Lesson 1. Don't run rsync as root. I knew that but have had some trouble in Karmic with rsync cron jobs and rather than fix the problem I broke the rules so the job would run consistently until I had the time and the inclination to fix it. If I'd run rsync under my own user account a failure wouldn't have had permissions to write to /media in the first place.
Lesson 2. I am not smarter than the filesystem tools that tell me something's not broken.
Now I'm not a power user by any stretch of the imagination but these are rookie mistakes - sometimes I get a little cocky, I guess
I still don't know what caused the target drive to unmount, though. Hardware failure wouldn't be my first choice.
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