Chkdsk doesn't find bad sectors in unused space

I know that Chkdsk /r is supposed to locate and repair bad sectors, but I
have discovered that it only does so on the parts of the hard drive that
contain data. I have a few old crappy hard drives with known bad sectors
on them that I used for this test. Using an IDE to USB adapter, I
formatted the drives as fat32 and ran Chkdsk on my XP machine...no errors.
I moved the drives to a Windows 98 machine and ran Scandisk...bingo, it
found bad sectors.

Next, I re-formatted the drives and put them back on my XP machine. As
before, Chkdsk did not find any bad sectors. However after I copied test
data to the drive, Chkdsk found the same number of errors that Win98's
Scandisk did. Obviously, Chkdsk does not find bad sectors on a drive
unless data has already been written there...which in my opinion is kinda
stupid. :-/

Long story short, is there another disk diagnostic program I can use that
properly scans an entire disk, just like Win98's old Scandisk program used
to? A previous thread mentioned SpinRite. Would that do a better job
than Chkdsk for locating bad sectors over the entire disk (even in unused
space)?

CHKDSK does run thruout the entire hd,thats why it runs for an hour or so.
Also,the results can be viewed in event-viewer.Also,if the hds are in use in
windows explorer,the utility is limited,try running in recovery console (boot
to xp cd).

To be honest I've rarely had chkdsk take longer than half an hour to run.
And if it does check the entire drive, then why does it not find bad
sectors until data has already been written to the drive?

[imwithid]

I've had the same problem. This is driving me crazy. I have a laptop hard drive placed into a caddy and had CHKDSK run overnight for approximately 13 hours twice (upon rebooting, it asked again to check the hard drive which I had allowed - it asked a third time but I thought this was a waste of time at this point as it started from the beginning each time) and I am randomly encountering errors that were not marked in the unused portion of the hard drive.

I understand that bad sectors cannot be fixed as I'm assuming that most of these are physical (head crashes, physical flaws during production, etc.). I want them marked in the partition table so as to minimize the probability of errors later on (as I'm encountering now).

It would seem far fetched to have to fill the entire hard drive with data first in order to properly mark all bad sectors.

In this application, SpinRite does not work as it does not detect external drives. I've tried a number of other applications (encountering a virus with one).

Has anyone found a disk application that can read the entire disk (regardless of partition type - I'm using FAT32 for this drive - required)?