Here is a great set of tools for hard drive status retrieval and monitoring:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki
The install for Windows is here:
http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/Download#Windows-InstalltheWindowspackage
On Windows, if you can get a command prompt on a remote machine, just copy over ‘smartctl.exe’ from the default install, run it like this:
smartctl --scan
and it will give you a list of IDE/ATA/SCSI drives. /dev/sd* and /dev/hd* will be actual hard drives, CD/DVD drives, tape drives, or RAID volumes; it won’t give useful info for anything but hard drives. Usually a single hard drive will be “/dev/sda”. You can get the health info for /dev/sda with:
smartctl -H /dev/sda
If it doesn’t pass the test, or if it gives any caveats after saying that its test passed, you have a drive whose hours are likely numbered!!!