In another thread, someone suggested that my harddrive might be failing and that I get a hardware utility to check this. I don't know much about how filesystems or hardware works. Is there a some free software I can get that runs a check on the harddrive that will tells me if something is wrong with the harddrive, so that I can post the transcript and get an interpretation here?

I have two harddrives: the first harddrive with Windows XP, plus a 10 GB EXT3 backup partition mounted to /mount/hdc; the second 7GB harddrive has Mandriva Linux on it. If my second harddrive is failing, I could put Mandrake on the backup partition on the first disk.

"In another thread, someone suggested that my harddrive might be failing and that I get a hardware utility to check this. I don't know much about how filesystems or hardware works. Is there a some free software I can get that runs a check on the harddrive that will tells me if something is wrong with the harddrive, so that I can post the transcript and get an interpretation here?"

All of the hard drive manufacturers provide free floppy based diagnostic programs. You can download one from the company that made your hard drive.

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Steve Stites

A third party diagnostic tool that I like is #1 TuffTest. The free lite version only checks the hard drive up to 540MB, but it does good, thorough tests so it's a good start.