Sam MacDonald wrote:
> My Hard Disk light on my laptop keeps flashing, like every second.
> It did not do this until yesterday.
> X Windows is much slower then it was early yesterday.
> I was working with Gimp and it just started to get slow.
> Evolution is getting really slow as well it's even hung once.
> 
> I'm thinking I may need to run a file system check of some kind.
> Any advice would be wonderful.

Sam - you should grab and install the smartmontools package:

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/
(for some reason, the main site seems to be down.  You can probably get 
a binary rpm/deb/ebuild/etc)

Once installed, run the following:

$ smartctl -a /dev/hdX

or whatever your hard disk device is.  Smart will spit out all kinds of 
diagnostic info about the drive. With smart, you can also tell the drive 
to do a self-diagnostic check.  Read the man page for more details.

Hope this helps!
-Erik

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