find out what brand your HD is, then go to their website and find some kind of CD bootable, bad sector checking program. I know they have sector checking programs for Seagate and I think Maxtor, and probably all the other major brands...
Same thing with checking for a virus, most anti-virus cd's have bootable virus scans, or find something similar to Ubuntu that is bootable from CD, and do a virus check while in there... (can't think of the one that has built in virus scan)