I have a web/irc server running the lastest version of Slackware Linux. After running the server for about a day I start to get imput/output errors and it won''t read from the hard drive. I thought it might be overheating but my dad said it might be a bad hard drive. Does anybody know of a linux equivilent to scandisk that can tell me if it is a bad hard drive?

It depends on what filesystem you''re running. If I remember correctly, the utilities are:
ext2 : e2fsck
ext3 : e3fsck
ReiserFS : reiserfsck

Anyway, look up the man-pages. And oh, I know from ext2 that you can''t check the FS while mounted. Don''t know about ext3 and Reiser. But you should be able to turn on checking while booting somehow...