How to find source of I/O error on Win 7 hard drive?

I've got several issues going on with a 80GB spinpoint SATA drive loaded with Windows 7, and a 100mb recovery partition.
I need to clone to a bigger drive, and have tried two packages, and both tell me something is amiss. I run the Windows 7 Startup repair and it says "no problemo" but that's not really a thorough disk checker.
I try to run chkdsk but one of two things happens: if I run it in recovery mode it is only checking the 100mb partition and I don't know how to force it to the big partition. If I try to bootup win and run from cmd.exe, it bails saying the volume is in use and cannot be checked.

Paragon Backup/Recovery, soon as it fires up, says I have an I/O error on the drive.
Driveimage XML, when trying to disk-to-disk image, says it cannot lock the volume.

I don't know what I'm dealing with, but can someone suggest a really smart disk utility package that can thoroughly analyze what's amiss here?

 

you can try samsung's hui utility

while in recovery mode, you need to specify the drive letter to check while using chkdsk
a command like chkdsk /p c: will check the c drive. You will have to figure out what drive letter you are on.

 

Have you tried running sfc /scannow, as this would check the system files as it did with Vista, and XP..