cdparanoia might be good for checking your audio CDs

It's usually used for ripping audio tracks, and it tries very hard to get it right, re-reading anything with errors and reporting on the various types of error, correctable or not. You can redirect the output to /dev/null if you don't actually want the recovered .WAV files.

For data CDs and DVDs,
tar cf /dev/null /dev/cdrom or similar should do the trick.

Totally free software, of course, including the OS they usually run on...

Anahata