> Note also it's inadvisable to do low-level checks on a live filesystem
> because things could be changing and corruption is inevitable.

I was checking a remote hard drive that had just been formatted and
thus thought worthwhile before actually copying data to it.

> Best way to check a disk is boot a Live CD to check the unmounted raw
> disk(s). There's even a way to do that in Windows.

If one is doing it that way does one in fact need to use a liveCD. If one does
System--Administration--Partition editor (Gparted)[select
drive]--Partition--Information

In this case one is only looking at information.