So I'm using Steve Gibson's SpinRite hard-drive maintenance utility to check the health of the Maxtor 6YI60M0 drive that I use to boot Orac up - running Ubuntu 14.04, of course.
The quirk is that SpinRite is a good ole fashioned DOS application, that I downloaded from http://grc.com as an ISO image. I then built a VirtualBox VM, booting from the ISO, with an attached virtual disk that points at the Maxtor disk ( /dev/sdb ) upon which Ubuntu is installed.
So I have a DOS application running inside VirtualBox running inside Ubuntu .... checking the health of the disk upon which Ubuntu is installed.
Confused ?
I am but this blog post certainly helped guide me down this twisty, turny path, all alike