Spinrite.

[Jason White]

eric oyen  <blinux-list at redhat.com> wrote:
>Badblocks has a couple of nice options that will allow you to mark off bad areas and write that info into a file that can also be used by mkfs when you go to make a new filesystem. These are utilities
>included by default in any Linux distribution. Also, all these utilities are command line and are quite accessible without the need of a special interface driver on a desktop. These are also available
>as command line utilities on just about every OS X machine around. Can't say that for windows.

Like Janina, I find Grml particularly useful for such tasks: it includes all
of the utilities you are likely to need, which can be run from the shell in
the usual manner.

Smartctl can invoke the hard drive's internal self-tests, which scan for
errors. I expect that they also mark bad blocks as unsuitable for writing. The
self-tests are performed in the background so you don't have to shut down the
operating system and boot into a rescue environment to run them.