Good question, good idea. I don't have an extra drive with sufficient capacity (40gb) to trade into it. The freeze happens so intermittently that I might go a week or more before seeing it, so I also don't want to go down to one of my 10gb spares because that would leave me with a paltry subset of my true collection.

But I wonder if there is a tool, either on the player or that I could add to the player, that will nondestructively test the hard disk sectors?

I know so little about the linux tool set, for all I know the right parameters to FSCK would do it, and I'd have no idea.