  (?) The Answer Guy (!)  By James T. Dennis,
tag@lists.linuxgazette.net Starshine Technical Services,
http://www.starshine.org/  (?) Removing Bad Sectors  From Fadel
on Fri, 22 Jan 1999  Dear Sir.. How are you? I'm Writing to ask
you How can I remove bad sectors HDD? Please reply me as soon as
you can.  (!) I'm not sure what you mean by "removing bad
sectors." A "bad sector" is a portion on a hard drive we doesn't
appear to reliably record data. That is to say that attempts to
record test patterns to this location on the disk and read them
back result in errors. Some bad sectors are manufacturers
defects on the surface of the disk (generally minor
imperfections in the metal-oxide or other coating which is
deposited on the disk platter during its manufacture). Before it
is shipped a normal hard drive is thoroughly tested on the
manufacturer's test harnesses to "map out" the initial set of
bad sectors and to ensure that the number of them fell below a
suitable threshold. Back in the old days (about 5 years ago