Tool for thorough test of hard drive surface???

I have been getting a message of 110 excess fragments when I do a Perfect Disk 7 defrag of my 40 gig notebook. The message also indicates that it is in the Metadata and c:\$BadClus.$Bad
In this past month, I have had the keyboard replaced and the LCD monitor all under warranty due to flaws.

My warranty is up next year May 2006 and I do have an option of extending the warranty for parts and labour at that time for 1 more year, which I will likely do. I purchased the notebook May 2003 and have had no issues until now, thank goodness for the extended warranty that I purchased from Toshiba and their Warranty Depot's efficient handling the replacements.
I took the notebook in for diagnosis for about 30 minutes, brought it back home and they ordered the parts and I went back and it took 45 minutes to install both parts.
I came home and used the Pixel Buddy software to check out the new LCD to make certain it was OK and the test was successful.
I must say the author of that program certainly should get a lot of credit!!

The Warranty Depot take asked if I had a HDD backup and of course I do, I use Ghost from Norton Premier Systemworks.
He said that I would have to bring the notebook back and he would use various softwares to determine the problem "corrupt files/bad drive"?

So I was wondering if there is a tool available that I could use that would NOT attempt to repair bad sectors and corrupt data; that the tool would only do a thorough surface examination without a repair attempt.
If I take it to the tech to test and it is not corrupt files then it will likely take me 5 days to get back up and running after installing the Ghost.
I use my notebook for work purposes and so I thought that I would do this post and see what comments I get.

Thankyou

 

I tried to do an edit of my post but was too late...had to catch the postie!! So I am adding these comments.

The Warranty Tech will have to wipe the drive clean and see if there are bad sectors/corrupt files and so that is why I was wondering if there was a proggy that I could use that would do a thorough scan of the HDD and not attempt repairs that could cause corruption of my data.

I need the computer for work and so I want to be able to get it back and operational as soon as I can.

i hope this comment adds more information to the above post that I was too late to Edit.

Thankyou

 

First, backup your data. Right now. Most people don't get the luxury of knowing their HDD is possibly failing before it does.

Next, determine the make of HDD you have. Usually, you can find this out by opening Device Management and expanding Disk drives. All HDD manufacturers offer tools to examine the health of their disks. You can find just about all of them here. Just search the page for your drive manufacturer's name.

Toshiba does make their own model of hard drives, but I'm not sure if they make a tool like this. I don't see one listed here. You might be able to get one from the Toshiba site, however.

 

My toshiba HDD is MK4021GAS and s/n 235A02197,rev GA224A.
I have checked my Support site for mobile computing and it only contains updates for BIOS, drivers etc. and I can't see anything that mentions a tool??

When I phone the support line as I am under toshiba's extended warranty of course they don't know what to suggest.

Any ideas???

 

Try HDD Regenerator for fixing bad tracks you can search and down load it at Google.com, it run at dos.