crooked windows wrote: Capacity 156GB
The drive is obviously fairly old, if it only has 156 GB.
For this kind of work, I prefer
System Rescue CD. Boot from the CD, and do both a SMART check with
smartctl --test=long /dev/sda (you can continue working while the test is going on -- note there's two hyphens before "test") and a bad blocks test with
badblocks -c 10000 -s -v /dev/sda . The badblocks command can take a while to run, especially if it does find bad blocks.
Once badblocks is finished, check the SMART results with
smartctl -a /dev/sda .
Windows alternatives are
Speed Fan for the SMART test and
HD Tune for the bad blocks test.
I've seen disks whose bad blocks were repaired by doing
badblocks -c 10000 -s -v -w /dev/sda . This destroys the data on the disk, but since you were planning to install Windows, you're obviously not concerned about the data.