I have used a multiboot system on my EeePC 901 for more than a year and never had any problems installing a new Linux OS (I even have Haiku working well here).
But Arch 2009-08 is creating the weirdest problem.
First I followed this guide to dd the Arch-2009.08-core.img to a usb key. The subsequent install to a partition on the EeePC 901 seemed to go fine. However, when I booted into Arch expecting to find the 2.6.30-ARCH kernel, uname -r said it was 2.6.28.7. Now the big problem with this is that this latter kernel does not include the modules for networking and wireless on the EeePC 901 while the 2.6.30-ARCH kernel does.
What's completely puzzling to me is that,despite uname -r showing 2.6.28.7 as the kernel, /lib/modules/ shows ONLY 2.6.30-ARCH as a subdirectory.
I even tried renaming the 2.6.30-ARCH directory to 2.6.28.7 but this still did not allow me to load either the atl1e or rt2860sta modules.
Next I downloaded kernel26-2.6.30.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz from here on one of my other Linux partitions. Then I moved it over to the Arch partition and installed it with pacman -U kernel26-2.6.30.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz
This seemed to go fine but when I rebooted to what I thought was the new kernel, uname -r still showed 2.6.28.7 and no network connection was possible.
Next I downloaded kernel-eee-2.6.30.5-1-i686.pkg.tar.gz from here and installed as before. This time vmlinuzeee showed up in/boot and I created a new stanza in my /boot/grub/menu.lst to boot to vmlinuzee (but with no initrd.img).
Amazingly, although the boot went fine, uname -r still showed good ol' 2.6.28.7 and once again I couldn't get a network connection.
Now, I have to reveal that on just one occasion of the, at least, 25 that I tried this, the network connection WAS created on boot and I had the 2.6.30-ARCH kernel. Mysteriously, however, this seemed to transmogrify itself, or whatever, into 2.6.28.7 after a few hours.
I am so puzzled and frustrated by this weird experience I hope somebody can help me shed some light on this.