Check disk
Most drive health maintenance is done internally by S.M.A.R.T. You can do more. Boot to a live mode to test root partitions.
This is a tested way to check a PARTITION for bad blocks, and repair:
su - e2fsck -c /dev/sda
To scan an entire drive for badblocks (which MAY cause firmware to improve things...?):
badblocks -svv /dev/sda
To repair a drive, you MAY try this, but not tested. e2fsck should be preferred according to [man badblocks]
badblocks -svvn -c 262144 /dev/sda