Thanks for the reply, Peter, and thanks for confirming what I suspected,
that Norton's, under WinXP, is simply using the OS's Chkdsk utility.  It
looks like the diagnostic utilities from drive manufacturers would be the
only other readily available means of testing a drive's surface integrity.
I'm assuming that it is no more risky running one of these on an NTFS
formatted disk than a FAT formatted disk.  In other words, in either case,
if the drive is failing, data may end up discarded from sectors that cannot
be read and that the stress of running one of these utilities may rapidly
accelerate the rate of failure of an unhealthy drive.

The only alternative to Chkdsk and the manufacturer's utilities that I've
been able to find that seems specifically designed to work with NTFS is the
recently released update to SpinRite, now SpinRite 6.  This utility seems to
have the features that I was looking for, and more.  Unfortunately, because
of it's sophisticated features, it's not cheap - $89 for a first time buyer.
I may have to just bite the bullet on that, although it seems like this
utility is a bit of overkill for what I was wanting.

John Sproule

----- Abbreviated Original Message -----
From: "Peter Shkabara" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:07 PM
Subject: Re: [PCBUILD] Hard Drive Surface Scans and NTFS


> Norton DiskDoctor relies on the CHKDSK utility of WinXP to do the
checking.

                  Visit our website regularly for FAQs,
               articles, how-to's, tech tips and much more
                          http://freepctech.com