[PLUG] Has my disk gone bad?

["Ed G." <edgee@cyberpass.net>]

I'm suspect my disk drive is going bad, but so far anyway the 
indications are fairly subtle.  I'd like to hear what you think.

Here's why I think it's going bad:

Sometime between 10 am and 3 pm yesterday my webmail server 
stopped working.  The server complained about a "parse error" in 
file 'mime.php3'.  When I looked at mime.php3 (a text file 
consisting of perl code), I discovered that the middle part of it was 
corrupted--control characters sprayed throughout it, like a baby 
who has just spewed his lunch all over the dining room table.  But 
the file's mod time shows that the file has not changed since 
installation in May.

I checked for other changed files using 'rpm -Va' and found a single 
file, m4.info-2.gz, with changed contents, but with an unchanged 
mod date.  gzip complained of a crc error when I attempted to 
unzip it.

I took a quick look at the system logs for yesterday between 10  
and 3 pm but didn't see any obvious signs of disk failure.  

What do you all think?  Is the disk going bad?  What else can I do 
to test whether the disk is bad?  

My disk has about 110,000 files in it.  Can I safely conclude from 
two known bad files that the disk is roasted or is this an 
"acceptable" rate of failure?  How common is it in your experience 
for small bits of the disk drive to fail, rather than a single 
catastrophic failure that leaves you unable to boot up?

TIA,

Ed


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