That is indeed what was going on.

The funny thing is, I read that FAQ entry but somehow glanced over the explicit warning about processes running from drive0. However, I inferred the same thing from the suggested rememdy of:

ro
umount /dev/hda4
umount /dev/hdc4
swapon /swapfile
fsck -fay /
fsck -fay /dev/hda4
fsck -fay /dev/hdc4
swapoff /swapfile
sync
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Hello, my name is Bingo. I like to climb on things. Can I have a banana? eek eek.