Need Help Formatting A Hard Drive With Bad Sectors

[jutral]

Bleh.. I need some help with a computer I have.. A few sectors (probably 5-10) on the hard drive are bad, and Windows had no trouble marking them bad and staying away from them. Well, I recently did an fdisk (which worked fine) and tried to do a format. Well, when I tried to run the format it stopped on the bad sector, said it was trying to recover the data, and just sat there (for upto 30 minutes - before I shut it down). Is there any way I can get the cluster(s) marked bad before I format, or any type of work around I can use at all? I know I could buy a new hard drive to fix the problem, but I really don't want to spend a fortune for a HD when this one is fairly new.

Please, any help or advice /at all/ would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[Journeyman]

This isn't what you want to hear, but if it's already got a few bad sectors, you really shouldn't use it. Once it starts to go, it's only going to snowball. If it's that new, see if it's still under warranty.

 

[jutral]

After doing some research I checked out my HD's manufacturer's website (Western Digital) and they had a utlity I could download to diagnosis problems on my hard drive, running in DOS. Ran it, did a quick check/fix, and the thing "fixed" or "marked" the bad sectors. Ethier way, I re-ran format and it worked fine. I wonder what the software could have done to an unformated disk..