Chkdsk doesn't find bad sectors in unused space

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? A previous 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

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