I recently discovered why Unimog died.
Once I finished Kamaz, I started sniffing around Unimog's carcass. My intention was to see what speed processor I had added, but in picking around, I noticed a funny looking capacitor -- it had dried brown foam on its head. I found other capacitors that were approximately the same size and make which didn't have any foam. Then I found a few other instances of foamed, leaking capacitors. This sounds like a strong candidate for the cause of my strange cascading file system failure (three drives in two days). When I checked the harddrives on another system, aside from some bad sectors, the Western Digital Diagnostics gave several of them a clean bill of health.
It took almost no research on Google to discover that many makes of motherboards manufactured around 2002 were made with cheap Taiwanese capacitors whose electrolyte was made on a faulty, stolen recipe. Consequently it was only a matter of time before they burst, ruining my board.
Abit apparently had the most problems, however they recently settled some sort of class action lawsuit. Gigabayte (the shameful maker of my ga-8pe667 Ultra 2 mobo) has kept totally quiet about the problem and offered no compensation. Shame on Gigabyte. Glad I didn't buy another one of your stinky boards.