[ubuntu-in] Trying to install Gutsy, Gparted says bad sectors but XP CHKDSK says NO

[Dinbandhu]

I just purchased a 3 year-old laptop (Dell Latitude D400) which has XP
on it. I want to set up a dual boot with XP and Gutsy. I have a Parted
Magic live cd so I booted up with that to downsize the XP partition and
free up space for Gutsy. Once Parted Magic booted up, I opened Gparted
to downsize the XP partition. But Gparted refused to allow a resizing of
the partition because it said it found at least 1 bad sector on the
disk. It further said I should run 'chkdsk /f /r' in Windows and reboot
it twice. It said that after that, I could resize NTFS safely by
additionally using the "bad-sectors option" of ntfsresize.

So I booted into XP to run chkdsk in the command line. Although I had no
other programs running, the chkdsk utility told me it could not run
because there were other utilities running. But it did say if I replied
"y" (yes), then upon a reboot it would run chkdsk. So I replied 'y' and
rebooted the computer. Chkdsk ran, and said the disk was perfectly fine.
I rebooted the computer twice, then went back into Parted Magic, and
Gparted still said it found at least 1 bad sector on the disk and
refused to resize. I went back to XP and ran chkdsk again, and again it
found no bad sectors. Again I went into Gparted, and again it said it
found at least 1 bad sector. So I don't know whether there is really a
bad sector or not, and furthermore Gparted will not allow me to downsize
the XP partition.

(1) How can I be confirmed if there really is a bad sector or not? If
there is, then I'll return the computer. This is a major concern for me.

(2) If there is no bad sector and Gparted is incorrect, then how can I
get Gparted to downsize the ntfs partition? 

(The "ntfsresize" utility is not so easy to use as gparted, because
"ntfsresize" only shrinks the file system, not the partition. Then you
have to use fdisk to shrink the partition and you have to match the size
of the partition to the size of the file system, otherwise it won't
work.)