But Windows would not allow Norton Disk Doctor to have direct control of the hard drive, meaning that a Norton Disk Doctor scan would require the machine to be shut down.

While researching this article, I attempted to use Norton Disk Doctor (part of Symantec's Norton Systemworks) to check the integrity of a drive on one of my servers. Several third-party disk utilities also do a good job of detecting file or folder problems, but many can only function outside of Windows. Oddly enough, the best tool for detecting file and folder corruption seems to be chkdsk. If you do detect some corruption, it may not be too bad, since you detected the problem early on, rather than waiting until the problem got to the point that it triggered a Windows error. The trick to protecting your data's integrity is to occasionally test the disk volume to make sure that corruption is not occurring. By the time Windows generates an error, you'll have been backing up corrupt data for some time. File or folder level corruption can occur gradually, and by the time Windows produces an error message it is often too late to completely fix the problem.

Chk dsk utility