Obrigado pelo retorno Phaleixo. Pesquisei um pouco mais e encontrei as informações abaixo e então me pergunto: os aplicativos que citei (GParted/Utilitário de Unidades) não fariam este mesmo trabalho? (ainda mais considerando que serão iniciantes que estarão a fazer uma primeira instalação do Ubuntu, vindos do Windows). Em todo caso, vou rodar o comando e postar o resultado assim que possível.
http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man8/fsck.8.htmlNAME
fsck - check and repair a Linux file system
SYNOPSIS
fsck [ -sAVRTMNP ] [ -C [ fd ] ] [ -t fstype ] [filesys ... ] [--] [
fs-specific-options ]
DESCRIPTION
fsck is used to check and optionally repair one or more Linux file
systems. filesys can be a device name (e.g. /dev/hdc1, /dev/sdb2), a
mount point (e.g. /, /usr, /home), or an ext2 label or UUID specifier
(e.g. UUID=8868abf6-88c5-4a83-98b8-bfc24057f7bd or LABEL=root).
Normally, the fsck program will try to handle filesystems on different
physical disk drives in parallel to reduce the total amount of time
needed to check all of the filesystems.
If no filesystems are specified on the command line, and the -A option
is not specified, fsck will default to checking filesystems in
/etc/fstab serially. This is equivalent to the -As options.
The exit code returned by fsck is the sum of the following conditions:
0 - No errors
1 - File system errors corrected
2 - System should be rebooted
4 - File system errors left uncorrected
8 - Operational error
16 - Usage or syntax error
32 - Fsck canceled by user request
128 - Shared library error
The exit code returned when multiple file systems are checked is the
bit-wise OR of the exit codes for each file system that is checked.
In actuality, fsck is simply a front-end for the various file system
checkers (fsck.fstype) available under Linux. The file system-specific
checker is searched for in /sbin first, then in /etc/fs and /etc, and
finally in the directories listed in the PATH environment variable.
Please see the file system-specific checker manual pages for further
details.