If all you need is the number of times the system boots up (which I believe is what you mean by the number of times it restarts), you can simply add a script in /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit (which is a file run on each bootup). The script should simply increment a counter present in a file. In this way, you can count the number of boots that have occurred at any time by looking at the file.
I think the following can achieve it:
* Create a file called numofboots.txt somewhere (for this example I use /home/you/numofboots.txt) and store the number 0 (zero) alone in it.
* Add these two lines to /etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit
Code Snippet
cat /home/you/numofboots.txt | xargs expr 1 + > tmp.txt
mv -f tmp.txt /home/you/numofboots.txt
Please let me know if there is a more elegant way to do it..
