This is meant as a follow-up entry to Matt’s SeaTools post-

For those of you who might want a little more brand-focused software helper, consider Maxtor’s PowerMax utility. You can grab it (or any of their other software) from their site.

The PowerMax utility is designed to perform diagnostic read/write verifications on Maxtor and Quantum hard drives. These tests will determine hard drive integrity. The PowerMax utility is effective on all ATA (IDE) hard drives with a capacity greater than or equal to 500 MB. Maxtor recommends the use of this utility for troubleshooting potential hard drive problems. These problems include, but are not limited to the following: Potential hard drive surface problems (e.g., bad clusters, bad sectors, partitioning/formatting problems, etc.); Drive recognition problems (e.g. hard drive that is not recognized by the operating system); Software removal.