Laptop Hard Drive Problem

[Chandler]

Some of you may remember the Time laptop which I had problems with freezing.  Well, all of a sudden it stopped freezing altogether.  I was quite please until I realized why.

It seems that there is a bad sector on the hard drive, and whenever it gets to this, it just keeps retrying endlessly.  Currently there is a huge video file in the place of the bad sector, but if boot time defrag runs again then it's probably going to start crashing again.

I know that I should really replace the hard drive, which I will do soon, but for now is there any way to mark the sector as "bad".  The Fujitsu hard drive diagnostics don't even start, since SMART has already "failed" the drive (for Raw Read Error Rate) and won't conduct any further tests.

If I run Windows XP CHKDSK /F (so that it scans on reboot) then it just hangs at a certain point.

[Chandler]

OK now I'm confused...

I ran the disk checker in Windows XP with the Scan for and attempt to recover bad sectors.  It completed fine and afterwards when I checked SMART there were no problems.

Does this mean that it could have been a glitch?  This notebook does appear to have the VIA 686B southbridge so could it be the data corruption problem that people described in 2001? (luckily my 686A escaped this)