Hard Disk Monitoring

I think it would be nice if you included some installation and initial instructions for newbies like me who are not familiar with packages not existing in the distribution repositories. I had to do the following to make it run on my Xubuntu 8.04 spare box:

1. with my filemanager I double-clicked the gzip and decompressed it somewhere (I used my home dir)

2. I changed the file's permissions to make it executable from a terminal using 3. I ran the executable with ... and I saw a very disturbing report: Health 64%, Estimated lifetime 64 days !!!
Needless to say I'm now in panic mode

Thank you very much for your thoughts!
You're correct: the installation instructions were missing. Now I fixed this, I added these lines to the Linux page.
Of course sudo is not required if the user logged in as root.

Mits wrote: ... and I saw a very disturbing report: Health 64%, Estimated lifetime 64 days !!!
Needless to say I'm now in panic mode

It is really not perfect ....
If possible, please save a report with using -R switch. If you can send me a such report, I'll analyse it to check the real situation.
I recommend to check the status periodically to make sure the status is not perfect but stable.
If new problems will appear (and the health will decrease) I recommend an immediate backup before continuing the use of this disk.

Some installation additions when you are on a console only system.

#Download the latest hdsentinel archive using wget that comes with most Linux distros.
#Unpack the archive. #Change file permissions to make it executable.
#Optional, rename to HDSentinel (to keep the creator happy ) If you run into trouble on a 64-Bit installation check out this thread

It looks like everything is already available. Nice.