BAD BLOCKS please help

[Robbo]

On Sun, 2005-07-10 at 15:15 +0300, ari.torhamo at saunalahti.fi wrote:
> > It is more trouble then it is worth...
> > 
> > 
> > Once drives start going bad..........
> 
> 
> In my experience too when you start to get bad blocks they don't stop 
> coming. Little by little they spread out wider on the disk. If you have 
> critical data on your disk, you would certainly risk losing it.
> 

All hard drives have bad blocks, just that the low-level formatting
hides them from the OS. 

Mustafa; As well as doing what Stephen suggested, you could low-level
format the drive (you will have to download the program from the hard
disk makers, and make a backup of all the data on the drive). 

You can't stop hard disks degrading, but 

Make regular backups.
Hot hard disks don't last long, check there not getting hot.
Data/Uptime time important? Use Mirror/Raid.