I'm not sure if this is the right group for this discussion, but I had
a couple questions in relation to bad sectors and the correlation of a
hard drive nearing a point of failure.


We currently use software to monitor, among other things, event log
errors on Windows machines. Windows will write error messages to the
system log when it finds a bad disk block. Sometimes these come in
large numbers (groups of 10+ messages at a time) and/or appear
frequently even after running, say, chkdsk.


My questions primarily reside in the nature of stand-alone IDE or SATA
hard drives, not RAID configurations of any sort, though not sure of
potential SMART status given that I'm thinking in very general terms
with a large amount of different computers & networks. How accurate
are the Windows event log messages in indicating that a hard drive has
a good potential of going bad soon and should be replaced? Is there a
threshold of sorts? Are there better software tools (small Linux-
distro utilities, perhaps) to monitor the actual physical health of a
disk, or to get a better picture of disk health going forward?


In general, I'm looking for a good way to automate disk health
checking in order to accurately tell a client "You need to buy a new
hard drive" before the disk itself is mucked past the point of simple
data backup/recovery operations.