I was wondering if anyone could recommend a good utility for scanning the
condition of hard drives under WinXP with NTFS.  It seems that the operating
system's scandisk only tests areas of the drive's surface that don't have
data already there.  Norton's DiskDoctor seems essentially do the same under
WinXP.

I'm guessing that this has to do with NTFS not wanting anything messing with
the data stored using it, but is this best that can be done under these
circumstances?  Does this mean it's probably not a good idea to run a DOS
based surface scanning utility on a NTFS drive, such as by using a bootable
drive manufacturer's utility disk?

I liked the thoroughness of Norton's DiskDoctor when run under Win98.  The
process of writing and reading data from every sector on a drive would take
hours to complete, but afterwards I had confidence when re-installing an
operating system on an older, reformatted drive.  And being able to repeat
this process from time to time on a disk that previously had one or two bad
sectors removed from service would let me know if things were continuing to
deteriorate or not.  I guess I'm wondering if there are disk utilities out
there that provide this same level of thoroughness under WinXP.

Thanks,

John Sproule

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