How to test hard drive

Hi, i'm trying to help a friend of mine who has an old iMac G3 400 MHz Ruby computer. Recently, the hard drive in the machine seems to have gone bad. I took the hard drive out of the iMac and installed it in my Windows PC to test it. A screen came up saying that the Maxtor Hard Drive was nearing a final crash point and advised me to back up all information. With the hard drive out, I installed a fairly new Seagate 7200RPM 120 GB Hard Drive in the iMac G3. With Mac OS not installed it would not boot into Mac OS and displayed a flashing question mark and folder. I made sure and set the hard drive to Master. When I start the iMac I can hear the hard drive come on, so I know that it is powering up. My friend however seems to have lost their Mac OS disk. The only disks I have are an old Performa startup CD and Mac OS 10.4.8 for Intel Macs. Is there any way I can test the iMac without a Mac OS startup CD to make sure the new Hard drive is recognized before I go any further? Also, upon starting up I've tried holding down the option key which brings up a screen with two arrows but no hard drive to click onto.

ALSO... I want to add that although I am much happier with Apple Computers, I must say that there needs to be some basic system test that the user can access by a certain key command at startup to check the hardware. I ended up having to use my PC to test the bad Hard Drive that I took out. Sometimes I think a good home computer system is one where you have a Mac and a PC as there are things that one can do that the other can't do. Macs are good at security and stability, but PCs are good at checking hardware, doing more everyday basic tasks, and good for experimenting with new hardware devices.
Once again, thanks for the replies.

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