Hi:

simply bad sectors is an area of the hard drive that will not write data
reliably.

so the program, scandisk, marks the area as bad and will not let windows
put any data there.

a few bad sectors is not a big deal.  But if you have having problems
writing to the disk or retreiveing data or programs or if you have a lot of
bad sectors in comparison to good ones the drive is probably no good, or at
lease is worth trying a low level format and then a new partition and high
level format and install the os again.  A low level format basically will
write all 0"s to the drive and wipe it clean.

You can get a low level format program from most of the major drive
manufacturers as a download or you can use a 3rd part program that you can
purchase seperately.

In the "old days" the manufacturers used to give a flag map of the bad
spots on each drive and when the drive was prepared for use, the builder
had to enter those areas manually in the low level initializtion program
that had to be first run.  The advent of IDE drives did away with that
procedure as the drives were low level formated at the factory and they
were able to hide the bad areas so they were not a problem to the system
builder


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