I recently purchased two WD20EARS Western Digital hard drives, and I installed Fedora 16 on one of them. After about a week, every time I rebooted the machine I would be greeted with file-system errors. Using fsck would temporarily solve the problem, but after the next reboot it would do the same thing again. I checked the drive using the Gnome Disk Utility, and it said it had bad sectors and was not healthy, so I decided the drive must have been a dud, and did a fresh install on the second one I purchased.
The second drive worked fine and has always reported as being healthy. But after about two and a half weeks, the same thing has started happening again. The thing is, the drive itself is still reporting as healthy. So I may have to look elsewhere to a solution to this problem. I am unsure if it is a hardware problem (Memory, my SATA interface, what?) or a software problem (something about Fedora 16). I still have a working Fedora 13 setup on a older 80 Gigabyte IDE WD drive which has never given me any issues with the same hardware.
I am at a loss at the moment, though I am going to run memory tests just in case. So if you have any ideas, even if they at first glance may not be applicable, give them to me anyway. I can not think of anything better.