disk drive controller failure

[Michael O'Brien <mobrien@pixar.com>]

Hola~

I've got a Dell Inspiron 8000 on which I have the unstable debs installed.

I believe the laptop has a buggy disk or drive controller. I'm finding some
files saved to the disk contain garbage. For example, in downloading the
kernel 2.4.2 source, one of the files contained some syntactically incorrect
c. I've also got some sort of corruption in some apt file as apt now cores on
startup. The real reason I believe this is a hardware problem is because I'm
seeing similar problems using Win2k.

Anyway, I was curious if there was some sort of disk drive diagnostic or
testing package? I was looking at bonnie, but it seems more geared toward
finding disk performance than diagnostics.

MO

-- 
Michael O'Brien                                                         Tools
Pixar                                                       mobrien@pixar.com

VIZZINI: You fell victim to one of the classic blunders. The most famous is 
         never get involved in a land war in Asia. But only slightly less 
         well-known is this: never go in against a Sicilian when death is on
         the line. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha--