What Utilities to check a Hard Disc?

["Craig Hagerman" <craighagerman@gmail.com>]

Hi,

I am wondering what utilities I can use to check the health of my hard
discs. On my mac powerbook I can check the S.M.A.R.T. status. A few
months the powerbook indicated the drive was about the fail. I backed
everythign up and sure enough it DID fail shortly aftewards. I just
had some strange messages on the console. I did an update and rebooted
to find messages like:
  "driveready seekcomplete error"

which is worrying. Debian wouldn't start up infact. I shutdown and
restarted in another partition (Ubuntu 32) which did start up OK. I
tried Debian again and it failed to boot. Tried Ubuntu and it failed.
(Getting quite worried here.) Tried the 3rd partition (windows) and it
did boot. After shutting down, Debian booted with no problem. Now I am
wondering if there is a serious underlying problem, but don't know
what utilities I can use to assess the situation.

Any advice about utilities to use would be much appreciated.

Craig Hagerman