Probably a question for Mark mainly.

It looks like the old (8GB) IDE drive in my main Linux box is failing (it was reporting IDE errors the other day, effectively stopping the box dead until I rebooted it). There have been no errors since, but I've decided to play safe and replace the disk.

I've got a new 40GB drive ready to use, but I thought it might be an idea to do some soak testing for a day or so.

Are there any good tools for doing this ? Either Linux or Windows based would be fine.

Supplementary question on the replacement. I was planning on creating a partition on the new disk the same size as my existing partition (I don't bother with multiple partitions) and then dding the whole partition across. Can I then later resize the 8GB ext3 partition, or would I be better off creating a new 30+GB data partition with the remaing space ?