I own and use SpinRite. I'm just looking for something elsethat can be ranwithin Windows. Plus, I don't want to spend major bucks to offer this. Just seems the time Windows reports bad blocks,it's to late to save everything on the hard drive without using SpinRite or something else like it or using a backup.
I just ran chkdsk /r on my machine and it took almost an hour to complete. We could always run that at night, maybe my machine is having some other issues. I don't know. I could live with something that took that long if it gave good clear results. "0k in bad sectors" is the best I can come up with on text to search for in the event log. SpinRite looks ok, but I agree at $89 it's way too expensive to use as a preventative approach.