Palimpsest says bad sectors- how to fix them?

[myromance123]

I am not sure where to post this thus I post it here.
Forgive me moderators if this is the wrong place.

My issue here is that I have a WD HDD (Western Digital External Harddisk) size 640GB. I partitioned it into 2 partitions in Window$ Vista and ever since my Laptop has not been able to read it unless I do it through the terminal. This is not the case for my Desktop.

The thing here is that Palimpsest Disk Utility (since 9.10) has started complaining that my HDD has a whole lot of bad sectors, BUT it doesn't tell me HOW to fix it....

I can't seem to find anything from Google (maybe wrong keywords, cant think what it might be?).

How can I "fix" these "bad sectors" if they are really bad sectors?
I checked with Vista and it says nothing of the sort.
The HDD was originally FAT32 but I changed it to NTFS when I added a partition.

*On another note, does Ubuntu need defragmenting? Is there even a way? These two things I can't find anything relevant from Google.

[alphaniner]

Please copy the text or post a screenshot of Palimpsest showing the details of the failure. For example:

REALLOCATED SECTOR COUNT - Count of remapped sectors. When the hard drive finds a read/write/verification error, it marks the sector as "reallocated" and transfers data to a special reserved area (spare area)

ASSESSMENT
Warning

VALUE
Normalized: 100
Worst: 100
Threshold: 5
Value: 8848628 sectors

It may be a bug, but we need to know exactly what Palimpsest is reporting.

[myromance123]

Here's a snapshot

[alphaniner]

The problem is probably real and not caused by a bug. The bug causes absurd numbers (like in my post, 'Value: 8848628 sectors'). I recommend you test your drive with Western Digital's diagnostic tool which you can get here. It may be able to remap the bad sectors. Choose one of the 'for DOS' versions, they are bootable.

[myromance123]

So there is no tool in Ubuntu or Linux to solve this type of problem?

Fixing bad sectors through Vista is also useless?

I'll test the DOS solution tomorrow as tonight I am too tired.

Thanks for helping me.

If anyone knows of a Linux tool/software that can do this I'd prefer that.

[oktapod]

I have different problem.

My BIOS has more than 1 years that alerts me before boot with
"s.m.a.r.t. status bad backup and replace" but I never considered it.
I had bad sector experience before (not with my HDD) and resolved it with HDD REGENERATOR that I would suggested to use, to myromance123.

Palimpsest seems to be a good utility but would be better to have the solution to.

If someone has more info or even the solution please help.

Thanks in advance.

[kkady32]

i have the same issue :bad sector
i download Hiren's Boot CD v.10.0 and run HDRegenerator and this repair problem.
now,message from palimpsest is :'disk is healty'

[kkady32]

i have the same issue :bad sector
i download Hiren's Boot CD v.10.0 and run HDDRegenerator and this repair problem.
now,message from palimpsest is :'disk is healty'