Ubuntu 10.10 tells the story when something is wrong.

[irv]

I am a retired I.T. Guy and had a computer repair shop on the side for many years. I still have people calling me to fix there computers. My daughter works with a lady who has a older Dell laptop, an Inspiron 130, which the HD crashed on. It only had a 40 Gib drive in it and it just so happens I had one laying around so I told her I would put it in for her. She gave me her WinXP CD so I went to reinstall her OS on it. Now here is what happen.
WinXP would get so far and I would get the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). I also had a couple of other HD that fit her laptop so I tried them with the same results. Finely I grab my Linux 10.10 CD and installed it. No problem with the install, but when I ran Ubuntu for the first time it told me the HD was bad and might fail soon.
I found this information very useful compared to just getting a BSOD with the message to try the install again.
To make a long story short, I call her and told her I would have to get a new drive and she did not want to put any money into the old laptop and she decided to buy a new laptop. She gave me the old laptop for trying to fix it, so I order a bigger HD off ebay and will fix it up for one of my grandkids.And of course I will install Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

[TBABill]

Cool story irv. I had a similar thing happen with 9.10. Got a free laptop out of helping someone determine their CD was fine but the HD was not. And it was not the notorius false "hd failing" notification from karmic that many encountered. This one did die soon after Cheap drive and I now have a perfectly operating laptop for about a $40 investment.

[irv]

I never thought of it, but I could have booted into the OS from the Live CD to see if it was OK. I don't know if it would have told me anything seeing it was running off the CD and not the HD. I also have a utility disk to check systems but I didn't grab that either.
I got the 350 Gib HD today and just put it into the laptop. Now all I have to do is install the OS's. I am going to make it a dual boot system with a License copy of XP that came with the laptop and was registered to that computer. Then I am going to install Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

[98cwitr]

10.10 also tells me my new SSD is failing

I dont trust the SMART data collection in Ubuntu

[irv]

10.10 also tells me my new SSD is failing

I dont trust the SMART data collection in Ubuntu

That's interesting! But that old 40 Gib HD was failing.

[TBABill]

Funny thing in Karmic was all the posts in the forums for the upper panel alert that their hard drive was failing. That was a bad bug because it caused a lot of panic and people were scrambling back into Windows to run diagnostics only to find out their hardware was fine. Your and my cases were definite hardware failure but I now take a cautionary approach to any disk issues reported by Ubuntu since thread after thread of reports ended up just being a bug.

[Oxwivi]

My 80 GB HDD was giving me problems, and whenver I used 9.10 Live CD it warned me. And like it foretold, the HDD went down under soon with my brother's aggravating repairing attempts. However, 10.04 Live CD didn't respond to any error on the HDD, I wonder why.

[earthpigg]

She gave me the old laptop for trying to fix it, so I order a bigger HD off ebay and will fix it up for one of my grandkids.And of course I will install Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

You could always grab a thumb drive and have it up-and-running right now.

[KiwiNZ]

The stop error message in the Blue Screen would have told you what was wrong. That is what it is there for.

[Canis familiaris]

^ More often than not that blue screen just shows for half a second and restarts. Not to mention the messages are cryptic (if it just freezes).