IPad won't power off and tends to spontaneously reboot

Question

When I try to power off my iPad (pressing the sleep button then sliding the "slide to power off" slider), it displays the wait progress indicator, goes black just briefly, then the silver Apple boot up logo appears as the device reboots which results in the device remaining on.
Worse yet, the device tends to frequently spontaneously reboot, often when the home screen is displayed and not performing any user operation.
I really don't want to restore the iPad as this results in metadata loss for thousands of audio files (Apple really needs to address this inadequacy and provide a Time Machine back up option for us users who choose to manually manage files on iOS). Is a device restore my only recourse?

Answer 1

It sounds like something is crashing your iPad resulting in this spontaneous reboot. Without knowing what you're running or if you've done anything unusual to your iPad, it's hard to say. There is a remote possibility that it's hardware related, but I would go the software route first. The only way to find the culprit, without completely restoring (which I would actually recommend here) is to one by one delete program apps and see if the problem ceases.
If you completely restore and the problem disappears, then it was software related. If you backed up your iPad before restoring, you should be able to restore it from the backup thus retaining any data you had stored previously. Of course, this would also reinstall the offending app that was causing this behavior in the first place, but at least you'd know it is software and not hardware related which obviates a visit to your local Apple Store.