Need badblocks on a Live USB(?)

My niece had her 500GB drive fail, though not completely. The drive is still spinning and still able to access most of the drive. However, it has tons of bad sectors which tend to hang the drive and OS. None of my Windows apps work because of the constant hanging and sudden dropping reappearing of the drive, and my DOS apps, although much better at handling the hangs, still tend to get stuck on certain blocks and just stay there for hours trying to access it.

I think badblocks in Linux might be able to get past the problems and just mark the sectors as bad, but I am not a 'nix guy, so I don't have any bootable USB sticks with any 'nix versions on it.

So, can anyone point me to a easy to setup and use on a bootable USB stick 'nix so that I can use badblocks?

I assume you can run it from ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows

or a bit more in-depth but instructions are there:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/FromUSBStick (find the create from windows about halfway down)