[Sorry for the sensational title]

I have had this laptop for three years. It ran Linux (Debian unstable)
from the start and its hardware has been very unreliable: I changed
hard disks twice and the motherboard thrice. My DVD drive started
failing some days ago (this one is 'original', 3 years old). But I
don't mind as I am not under warranty anymore... This morning the
machine booted with fsck errors on my hard disk. I am not sure if I
did the right thing, but I said clear the inodes, and I ended up
loosing some programs(*) (du, dircolors, etc..). The day starts well
isn't it? Sounds like I will have to switch disks again...

I halted the machine correctly yesterday night. I never dropped the
box in 3 years. Am I just being unlucky? Or could the fact that I am
using Linux on the box affect the reliability in some ways on that
particular hardware (Dell Inspiron 8100)? I run Linux on 3 other
computers and never had single problems with them.

How can the file system (ext3) be messed up the way it was this
morning after I stopped the machine correctly yesterday?
Could a hardware failure look like bad sectors to fsck?

Attached the output of smartctl -a /dev/hda, whatever that helps.

Jerome

(*) I accept tips on discovering and maybe recovering which files have
been taken out of my system...