can anybody recommend a bootable program to check and fix errors on hard drives, it needs to be easy to use and portable or run from windows or standalone and be able to work with the major filesystems eg. ntfs,fat (and its variants)
sorry for the misunderstanding i should have said free, spinrite is bootable but as far as i know you have to pay for it
i think TestDisk on the UBCD is supposed to be a good program. also you could schedule Chkdsk to run on reboot with the various options. Supposedly Chkdsk can be added to UBCD thru the Avira NTFS4DOS plugin.
To force run chkdsk at boot time, Technician Toolbox from Tweaking.com is perfect if you don't want to bother with command line.