Is There A Way To Test My Hdd For Problems?

Is there a way to test an HDD to see if it’s failing? or soon to die?
My situation stands as this! ^_^
I recently reinstalled my OS and did a dual-boot install (I always do this). I keep one side as my Workstation for music production, completely cut off from the internet (after I install all neccessary drivers for everything and xp (64) updates) and with no other apps installed (such as games, media apart from what is neccessary, etc)
This has worked for me in the past and I have had no problems out of the specific software that I use.
The other side is for everything else that you’d expect to use a home computer for. Games, browsing the net, media, downloading etc.
Before I decided to a clean install I was experiencing problems watching movies or anime on my computer. Some files of a series would for no reason play, despite w/e player I used (I used VLC, GOM player, the K-lite codec bundle, everything people suggested to me)
and yet some of the files WOULD play, or files that were of the same format of a different series would play just fine. Oftentimes with any .mkv files that acted this way, I would just convert them to AVI and they would work fine afterwards.
Then I started to notice problem on the Workstation (The other OS installed for my dual-boot setup.) Up until now I have had no problems, but now I’ve been experiencing random crashes in FL Studio whenever I’m loading plugins, that otherwise used to work before.
Other items of interest I notice on both OS’s is how sometimes I would get the error message “This disk is write-protected, etc etc files cannot be edited blah blah blah” whenever I try to save something somewhere, or delete a file on a specifc partition, or sometimes on all of them. I end up having to restart the computer several times before this error goes away. But soon enough it appears again.
Is this the sign of the HDD going wacky on me? I haven’t installed any new hardware, much less introduced any new software that I’m aware of compared to my last reinstall of windows. And since these problems occur on both OS boots, is it possible? The HDD itself is making no noise, so I’m not sure if it’s that or not. I have done scandisk with all of its options, no errors are found, I defrag often enough. I do not know much else to do, are they’re programs out that scan your HDD for bad sectors or what not?