cfdisk¶
cfdisk ist die via ncurses realisierte Textoberfläche zu fdisk. Es ist interaktiv, selbsterklärend und stellt die wichtigsten Aufgaben über eine Menüsteuerung bereit. Die Steuerung erfolgt über die Pfeilstasten und Enter.

Sometimes a storage medium simply refuses to work at all. It still appears as a block device to the kernel and in the disk manager, but its first sector holding the partition table is not readable. This can be verified easily with:

sudo dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null count=1
If this command results in a message about an “Input/output error”, our drive is broken or otherwise fails to interact with the Linux kernel as expected. In the a former case, with a bit of luck, a data recovery specialist with an appropriately equipped lab can salvage its content. In the latter case, a different operating system is worth a try. (I've come across USB drives that work on Windows without special drivers, but not on Linux or OS X.)

Badblocks
You can also use badblocks

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda
to just check, or to check and fix first write the result to a temporary file:

sudo badblocks -sv /dev/sda  > bad-blocks-result
sudo fsck -t ext4 -l bad-blocks-result /dev/sda1
will check the whole disk and print out all bad blocks encountered on /dev/sda.

From badblocks manual:

Important note: If the output of badblocks is going to be fed to the e2fsck or mke2fs programs, it is important that the block size is properly specified, since the block numbers which are generated are very dependent on the block size in use by the filesystem. For this reason, it is strongly recommended that users not run badblocks directly, but rather use the -c option of the e2fsck and mke2fs programs.

fsck - check and repair a Linux file system. Invoke it using

fsck /dev/sda1
where /dev/sda1 is the drive you want to check. See 'man fsck' for more details.

There's also 'badblocks' command which checks a device for, you guessed it, bad blocks.

The drive need to be unmounted when checked, so to check the root partition you need to create a file 'forcefsck' in the root of the partition and reboot. The device will be checked upon the next boot:

sudo touch /forcefsck
sudo reboot
Alternatively, you can boot from a Live CD and run the check from there.