Undies~ is absolutely correct! If you do support professionally or on a regular basis you should have this tool! You can find out more here:

http://www.dposoft.net/

It is commercial software, and costs about the same as a replacement drive, which is why I don't normally recommend it to the pilgrims who visit here with their "once in a blue moon" disasters

Anyways, I am a cheapskate b*****d and prefer stuff that is free, or at least legitimate (30 day trials etc)

It is unique software as far as I am aware. It scans the HDD at machine level using sophisticated algorithms to detect and repair magnetic write anomalies. These are typical of what you get when you have a power glitch (or the office cleaner pulls the plug) or an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) such as in a thunderstorm.................I mean, none of my users ever perform an "improper shutdown" do they?................that reminds me, I am meeting a guy about a nice beach front property in Arizona (Ayers Rock for the OZ contingent)

It is hardware and OS independent and works off bootable media.

The only downside is that it takes rather a long time to run (it has to be thorough to do its job)

As we only learned about the power outage late on in this thread, I did not give it a thought at first.