How do I physically test a harddrive
 

I got got a 20GB Seagate for the purpose of playing around with other distros without touching my main drive question is after I install it how do I run a physical test on the drive to make sure its ok? It was my friends and he thinks it fine but I'd like to check it out.

I would like to know the same thing.

Basically, what is the Linux alternative to scandisk.

fsck will check the file system for errors, but I don't think it can detect hardware errors and bad sectors.

I did a bit of searching and I came across badblocks.

I haven't used it, but by the looks of it, it will do a surface scan on the HDD much the way DOS's scandisk program will (but without the graphical status display).

Reading the man page is a bit frightening though, it looks like there is a lot of potential for destroyed data. But your drive is blank, so you should be fine.