A way to finish off a dying hard drive so it can be sent in for "repair"

I have a 500G SATA hard drive in my machine that all the sudden started giving me I/O errors, until Linux simply disconnects the drive. Reboot, and then it works for a random period before failing again.

The drive is within warranty, but I've had bad experience with shops that are unable to reproduce a problem, as the drive doesn't fail all the time. Then they simply send me a bill and the drive back.

What is my best course of action to make sure they can reproduce the problem?

Update: Those of you who have recommended the diagnosis tools, it's a good valid answer, expect as stated in my question, I'm running Linux and these tools do not exist for it. As for 'gaming' the store, it's not about that. The drive is well on its way of being completely unusable without any help from me. I'm just talking about speeding up the process.

Update 2: I don't really know why I decided to ask this here. I was hoping for suggestions like 'do a badsector test', 'try to stress the drive with copying random data to it with dd'. I will say this again, so stop suggesting it or suggesting me not to... I will not in any way terminate my warranty by messing with the hardware itself, that includes; bulk erasers, huge magnets, too much power or anything that will show up when the drive is eventually sent back to the manufacturer.

Does the drive manufacturer have a utility to check the drive?

Often they will provide a utility that you can boot with that will run some diagnostics - this should probably be your first step. Check there website and download if available

I think the best thing to do is to call them and discuss this situation - any form of 'gaming' them is likely to be pointless and very possibly counterproductive. These people are used to dealing with a range of customer's problems and I would imagine they'll be happy to help you if you ask.

I would recommend using SpinRite as well as the manufacturer's tools. I have previously used it to recover data on a dead drive. The great thing about SpinRite is that it can detect the rate of errors (errs per MB).

Usually when RMA'ing a drive, they make you include a status code of some kind from their diagnostic tools.