What you need:

• a good earing
• smartmontools

Indeed, so far, I haven’t found anything better than launching a process making a lot of disk activity.

This command just do it:

% sudo smartctl -t short /dev/sda

The “short” test will give you a few minutes to carefully listen and select the right disk.

Well, it sure is pretty primitive! But do you know anything better?

By the way, there is a good article for the recovery procedure.