Today I finally realized the culprit to my broken Linux systems.  My Samsung SATA2 hard drive acted up again last night.  This time I knew it was not related to an Arch Linux update, it was my hard drive.  /dev/sda2 partition blocks came up with many similar errors I saw three weeks ago when Gentoo went down.  In fact, each time my Gentoo system broke down, it turns out it was due to the faulty hard drive, I just did not know it at the time.

Luckily I was able to backup all my data from the hard drive, just the beginning blocks had errors.  Arch Linux would not reboot.  It was actually in the Arch Forum where I realized my hard drive was having problems though I suspected it a month ago already.  It worked fine for three weeks so I forgot about it.

I removed my Samsung SATA2 and replaced it with a Western Digital SATA2 drive.  Installing Arch on it was easy.  No errors as I normally had in the past (I used work arounds to get Arch running three weeks ago).  I will exchange my Samsung hard drive for a new one since it is still under warranty.

Arch Linux is currently being installed from scratch on my desktop.  Can’t wait to get back to work again.

Edit: Will play around with Gentoo 2008 Beta first then I will go back to Arch.  openSUSE 11 will go back on my Thinkpad this week 🙂