Strange HD behavior

[Luiz Eduardo Guida Valmont]

Hi,

I've recently (2 or 3 days ago) installed 6.1-BETA4 (from bootonly CD). The
installation process went on flawlessly. Then I left kdebase3 compiling (and
its dependancies) overnight. But I woke up the next day to find the login
prompt and a few (2, i guess) messages of bad blocks somewhere in the /usr
filesystem (just as a side note: I chose the automatic partitioning scheme
after alocating some 15GB).

So what bugs me is that my HD may be "dying" (or expiring, for that matter).
However, I never got any sort of bad block message while running Linux for
more than 6 months, though I've certainly experienced some weird behaviour
not noticed by a friend o' mine who has the same distro (note: I used to run
KDE 3.5.1 and he still run KDE 3.5.0). Besides, I installed 6.0 and I used
to get this very same behaviour a month or so ago. And even before that, I
used run 5.3 (I got no error messages whatsoever).

Is there an OS agnostic HD diagnose tool that's reliable?

The HD is a Seagate one.

--
[]'s,
Luiz Eduardo