Best practices for troubleshooting a failing HDD

[James Michael Fultz]

* Andrew Farris <flyindragon1 at aol.com> [2009-12-02 03:06 -0600]:
> One trick i remember from someplace is to use dd to make a copy of the
> disk partitions, but just pipe the output to /dev/null...then watch for
> errors. I don't remember if there's more to it than that, so you may
> want to read up on the concepts.

That would likely work.  There is also the badblocks command.