server survives 4 foot drop

[Charles Galpin <cgalpin lighthouse-software com>]

The shelf my poor server in question was sitting on (and running happily) 
collapsed unexpectedly today. I happened to be standing next to it and (sort 
of) caught it before it hit the ground, but it got a good jolt never the 
less.

I stuck a monitor on it, and the console background was flashing red, and 
was  printing out  various disk read/block errors. I was a bit distracted at 
the time :) and just shut it down, not really paying attention to the errors 
- they did not look good!.

Anyway I rebooted, and it ran fsck, and things seem ok. I looked in the 
messages file and dmesg, but didn't see any relevant messages about this 
event.

The reason for my post is this - what can I do to extensively test this disk 
to make sure it's not going to go bad anytime soon. I live a 850 miles away, 
and this will be left in the care of my mother and her non-technical staff.

tia
charles