Hi, in addition to what others have said, I'd like to point out a disk test utility I stumbled across the other day and found quite nice. It's made by Hitachi and is called Drive Fitness Test. You can download a bootable floppy or CD image from http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm. It requires booting the image of course, so you'll have to take your machine down. Cheers Steffen.
