Question : Problem: How do I do a clean check for a FAT32 drive?

I was previously sharing a physical drive between my host computer and a VM guest, at the same time. Then I read that it is extremely dangerous to do this because the drive expects only one operating system to share its table at a time. I was doing this share for about a couple weeks until I stopped. But now I am worried that I already caused damage to my data. How can I perform checks on the drive to make sure there are no errors that I should worry about. I would greatly appreciate any help or input. Thanks.

Answer : Problem: How do I do a clean check for a FAT32 drive?

First, you don't need any hardware diagnostics (all of the manufacturer's diags and 3rd party tools listed above) ... IF you have any issues, they aren't hardware issues ==> it would be a simple file allocation table corruption.

HOWEVER, even that is VERY unlikely.   When you say you were "... sharing a physical drive between my host computer and a VM guest ..." how exactly did you implement that share?   Most of the time, the shared drives are shared via a network connection between the VM and the host ==> in this case, the drive accesses are all actually controlled by the host, and there's NO chance of any corruption.  It works exactly like any other shared network access ... the fact that both "network" machines are in the same physical PC doesn't matter.

If, however, you configured VMWare to use a Physical disk for its storage (usually this would be a dedicated partition you set aside for this purpose), then it is true that you should not allow both the VM and the host to have access to this same physical disk at the same time ==> this CAN cause corruption if the same elements of the file allocation table are written by both OS's at the same time (thus one overwrites the other).   While relatively unlikely ... since you were most likely using one OS at-a-time; it IS possible this happened.   But it's easy to check:   Simply run ScanDisk against the drive [just right-click on the drive from My Computer; select Properties; click on the Tools tab; then select "Check Now" in the Error-checking section].   If the drive is actively being used by Windows, it will do the check on the next reboot ... otherwise it will check it immediately.   Be sure and check the "Automatically fix file system errors" box.