I think if you look further into Spinrite you will find it will do
everything you want.  It will recover data as well as test the soundness
of the surface.  Even that test can be set as to how thorough you want
to test it.

In alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt "Gabriel Knight"
<fakeemail@hotmail.com> wrote:

Um ... That's exactly what Spinrite *DOES*; and far better than *ANY*
other program!  It has more options of doing far deeper tests than any
other program you can find *anywhere*.

It also has the option of *FIXING* bad sectors, recovering bad sectors,
or just reporting errors.

Its one major fault is that it's a stand-alone program.  Because of the
depth of the search for bad sectors and the way it does sector-checking,
it cannot run under Windows.  It uses factory commands to turn on/off or
adjust retries and ECC error-recovery so that it can find (and often
recover) bad sectors; or at the least flag them as unusable.  So the
usual way of running Spinrite is to have a DOS boot-disk that contains
Spinrite.

Believe me: Spinrite is *exactly* the program you're looking for.
Nothing else comes even close.

Other than that, Just run Scandisk in full mode; or if you have Norton
Utilities, run Disk Doctor (again, in full mode).  Disk-Doctor is about
twice as fast; but otherwise doesn't have any better diagnostics.
Either one will do a "quick and dirty" check for errors; but to my
notion neither one is worth a damn.  However, either/both are about as
good as any other program out there except Spinrite.  They just do a
fast read of the disk and see if any errors are reported.  (The way
drives work these days, hiding errors from the user, usually none *will*
be reported, even on a drive about to fail in two hours.)   ;-{

Nope: Get Spinrite or just toss the disk.
A 20 gig drive these days is so small, it might not be worth the cost of
buying Spinrite ... Besides, the drive is old.