Well, unless your disk drive is broken, simply removing the power from it doesn't do any damage. (Well, you could break it eventually by just powering it up and down often enough, but the same goes for anything from a lightbulb to a supertanker.) In fact, disks have enough residual power to finish writing the current block when the power down, something that ext3 knows about and which is vitally important (I recall reading about this somewhere in a discussion of ext3 and journalling file systems).<snip> The only thing I might want to try is to run a badblock check on the drive(s) just in case there was some actual physical damage. </snip>
And how do you do that???
Anyway, if you're really worried,
badblocks -s /dev/hda
will do a read-only scan of the disk. If I run this I do it when the system is idle as it does tend to cause some performance degradation :-)
Don't use badblocks -w unless you want to trash the disk though.
A more useful approach though, is to install kernel-utils from rawhide (I've got 2.4-8.31 here) which includes smartctl which uses the S.M.A.R.T. stuff to monitor the health of your disks. Disks generally know when they're going to fail and you can monitor your disks with "smartd" to keep an eye on them. Definitiely recommend that if you got at least one disk somewhere.
jch
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