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 🙂
Let me know if you hit any problems with Gentoo that you can’t get past!