hard disc health checks

[Ian Malone]

Has anyone any suggestions for checking the physical
health of a hard disc?  Something analogous to the
"surface scan" in Windows Scandisk?

I've got a disc which has some sectors marked as bad
by  Windows scandisk, and has had them for quite a
while (for no obvious reason; I think scandisk messed
up at some point).  smartctl for the drive is fine.
Recently though I've suffered some filesystem
problems.  This could be a filesystem error, due to
a scandisk crash which occured while checking or a
bug in the vfat module (since the first I noticed it
was after unzipping a file on the disc using linux
and then rebooting into Windows).

I'm currently taking steps to back up the data (and
recover some of the lost stuff), but I'd like to
have something solid to check whether I can trust it
in future, any thoughts?

(Apologies for any errors, rushed email)

-- 
imalone