Bad hard drive or bad kernels ???

[Gabriel Ramirez]

>> On Thu, 2010-06-10 at 21:22 -0600, Linuxguy123 wrote:
>>> I've checked the hard drive.  All the SMART data says the drive is fine.
>>> And grub has never failed to run.

are you tried running:

smartctl -t short /dev/sda
that takes a couple of minutes
smartctl -t long /dev/sda
that can take hours depending the size of disk so try to execute to a 
time where you will not shutdown or occupy too much the machine

the above commands tell the time which will take after that
execute:

smartctl -a /dev/sda | less

and go to the end that will tell if the test completed without error

or maybe that will uncover some error with the hard disk.

Gabriel