HDD burn-in tester to locate bad sectors?
 

A hard disk occasionally fails. Standard checks like fsck and scandisk fail to report any problem. Is there other software to exercise the disk much more thoroughly so that bad sectors have no chance of being missed?

The problem with this idea is that in all bad sectors can happen at anytime... because a drive doesn't have any right now doesn't mean it won't 5m from now. Scandisk should pick them up if they exist at present, if you want to 'burn in' a disk you could try one of the many burn in programs or even dd 1s over the whole disk. Then of course there is always the drives own smart reporting...

It's an external usb drive. I know with internal drives you can enable smartdrive in the bios but how do you do it with an external one?