But not on the same machine. THis involves the insidious Palimpsest Disk utility, you know, the one that whines a lot? Well, this is mostly just a few small questions. First, I know bad sectors can become an issue after a while, but if you do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda will this keep the amount of bad sectors from doing any more harm, though they will probably still be there, or will my hard disk eventually resort to seeking for hours to no avail? And, one last one, how do you clear the ATA smart history, if possible? My other desktop is whining about the failed PSU that caused the disks to re-spin, saying the spinup retry count is six. Forgive me, I know little about hard disks, exept the basic mechanics. THanks for any help.

UPDATE: I now remember where these bad sectors came from. About three months ago, this little netbook was accidentally flipped over when it was installing an RPM, and from the looks of things, it looks like the little guy suffered a head crash. Apparently there was not too awful much damage, but I have my old trusty 30GB 2001-era drive in case it craps itself. Also, thank god, it's on that tiny mandriva partition I never use. Thank the lord.