Is there a better disk-maintenance utility than Chkdsk out there?

This is a re-post of something I asked over in Help and Support. I didn't get any useful answers over there, so hopefully this will be a better place. Thanks in advance!

I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that contain data. I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors on them that I used for this test. Using an IDE to USB adapter, I formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors. I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran Scandisk...bingo, it found bad sectors.

Next, I re-formatted the drives and put them back on my XP machine. As before, Chkdsk did not find any bad sectors. However after I copied test data to the drive, Chkdsk found the same number of errors that Win98's Scandisk did. Obviously, Chkdsk does not find bad sectors on a drive unless data has already been written there...which in my opinion is kinda stupid. :-/

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used to? Another thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do a better job than Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire disk (even in unused space)?
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Relevant Pages

  • Re: Scheduling CHKDSK and DEFRAG for unattended execution
    ... A single hard disk can have multiple volumes, ... can create an unlimited number of logical drives per disk. ... Description of Enhanced Chkdsk, Autochk, and Chkntfs Tools ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: Scheduling CHKDSK and DEFRAG for unattended execution
    ... A single hard disk can have multiple volumes, ... can create an unlimited number of logical drives per disk. ... Description of Enhanced Chkdsk, Autochk, and Chkntfs Tools ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.perform_maintain)
  • Re: Hard Disk Failure
    ... Does the HDD's OEM diagnostic tool see the full size of the HDD, ... Do you see anything in Disk Management that relates to the 160GB HDD, ... tool on the drives and this is the result. ... Sectors per Cluster: 8 ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Chkdsk at every startup
    ... "The file system structure on the disk is corrupt and unusable. ... It gives a link to a page that advices me to run chkdsk /r, ... the drives formatted as FAT32 or NTFS? ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.help_and_support)
  • Re: DOS prompt in W2K? and Safe Mode?
    ... and windows booted up normally. ... How to get to a real DOS prompt to run chkdsk w/o processes? ... you wish to check other drives then you may be able to close ... CheckDisk is a powerful tool for searching and repairing disk errors. ...
    (microsoft.public.win2000.general)