[OT?] Hard disk dying?

[Alisdair McDiarmid <alisdair@jml.net>]

Sorry if this is offtopic, please redirect me to somewhere more
appropriate if you can.

I rebooted my woody/2.2.15 machine cleanly yesterday, but fsck found
errors on root, and /home and /var wouldn't even fsck: the kernel
just printed errors like:

hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
hdb: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=15456326,
sector=1760

I mounted the partitions readonly on another machine, copied the data
across, then mkfs'd on each partition and copied the data back. The
machine *appears* to work now: fsck runs fine on them, but I'm still
getting the occasional error like above. I've tried turning DMA off,
but the errors are just about the same.

Does this mean I have a faulty disk? How can I test if the disk is
faulty or if it's something else?
-- 
Alisdair McDiarmid                                    alisdair@jml.net