In windowsxp, if you do a chkdsk, it gives you details on whether a drive has bad sectors or not. To do chdsk - start >> run. type chkdsk x: where x is the letter of the drive. Do this for all drives, at the end of the test it'll give you results saying "x kb in bad sectors." You're lucky if the x here is 0. If not, all I can tell you is - Don't buy.
Windows is the best software you'll need.
Do this -
Start >> Run. Type "cmd" then press enter. You should get a ms-dos style command prompt box.
*. Now type chkdsk x: where x: is your drive letter. The rest is as I said in that post, only this time, the command prompt window wont close after completion. It'll stay open for you to view. See the x kb in bad sectors line.
that was a very helpful tip...I used to check for bad sectors in dod mode when I use to have win98se...but when I switched to XP a couple of years ago I struggeld a great deal to get the results in XP until today. Thanks for your tip. BTW you replied gsoul2soul with "hdtach" ...what does that mean?