Use smartmontools:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Smartmontools

Hard drives have a self diagnostic capability called SMART. The
program "smartctl" will let you run diagnostics on the drive.

For file systems you need to use fsck. But the file system cannot be
mounted read/write if you want to verify it. You can boot into single
user mode to check out your filesystem(s).

On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 9:39 PM, Sean Breheny <shb7@cornell.edu> wrote:
> One more question: I have a slight suspicion that the problem may be a
> malfunctioning hard drive. How do I run diagnostics on the hard drive
> and file system in Ubuntu?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Sean
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