[ubuntu-uk] Diagnosing Faulty HDD

[Jon Reynolds]

Hi Folks,

My son claims his hard drive is faulty. He lives remote from me so I
couldn't look at the symptoms first hand. His diagnoses is basically, that
when he tried to log in (WinXP) the password would only work if he puts
caps lock on (?) and when he was logged in, there were many many graphical
artifacts everywhere, windows opening randomly and generally unusable.

The faulty HDD came from someone performing a scan on the drive and
reporting that it was 'full or errors'.

Before we go any further, I have the HDD, out of the machine. (I got him
to bring it with him). This was when I thought it was just faulty, before
he told me that it did actually log on but behaved badly (I immediately
thought corrupt or infected software).

But seeing as I now have the drive in my possession, I need to ask advise
on diagnosing whether the drive is indeed faulty or not. I don't (easily)
have access to any PCs to put the drive in, so I am hoping I might be able
to diagnose by putting the drive into an external USB enclosure that I
have, plugging it into my netbook and going from there...

Can anyone please advise best steps to take (using Ubuntu obviously)?

Much appreciated.

-- 
Thanks and regards,

Jon Reynolds (j0nr)
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http://www.jcrdevelopments.com