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Linux PC acting up? Here's my first course of action (and why it fixes things 99% of the time)
If your Linux machine is acting buggy, faulty blocks or sectors on your hard drive might be to blame. Do this before it's too late.
This can happen because of physical damage to the drive or failing transistors on flash memory (think SSDs). What you'll need: The only things you'll need for this are a running instance of Linux and a user with sudo privileges. If badblocks report that there are, in fact, bad blocks on your drive, you'll want to mark them as unusable.
Or read this on ZDNet