so think ill have to fix my bad sectors/blocks before i can do anything like install rh9 again. so does formatting fix bad blocks/sectors? if not, how can i fix that? i believe that that is my problem now. i cannot run mskf -c from boot disk or without it.

i have an 80 gig HD, approx. 30 on the linux/ext3 partition, and the rest on the shared windows/linux fat32 partition. if there's a way to fix my ext3 partition without getting rid of the shared partition that would be cool, so let me know.

do a low level format (will erase all contents of the drive). but that is not guaranteed to fix those bad sectors. some older machines (pentium -r/-s era) comes with BIOS loaded with low level formatting utility. heh - a 1GB hdd would take looooong hours to be formatted.

get a new drive. hdd nowadays come cheap. i suggest that you get two drives (40GB each would be nice) so you don't have to worry about losing your other OS when something goes wrong with the other one.

you need the sector remapping tool that comes from
the manufacturer of the drive. most make them. some
delete the contents of the drive and some don't. names
are like maxllf and wddiag.
drives comes with extra sectors on them for the purpose
of remapping bad areas. generic low level formatters
rarely do anything, and the drive just ignores the
commands and does a sort of a normal format.
the low level formatter from the manufacturer will mark
the sectors bad permanently, and thats what you want.

another option is patitioning in a way that skips the
bad areas. that takes some trial and error, or a little
math.

You should look at your HD manufacturor's support site for a DOS based floppy which is used to install your hard drive. This floppy will also probably have a low level format program which will assign bad blocks to spare blocks.

In addition to your HD problems you have been having consistent problems with your CD-ROM. It is possible that the problem is your IDE controller. You can check out this possibility by swapping the HD and CD-ROM to another machine and by swapping a known good HD and CD to your problem machine. Does the problem follow the HD and CD to the other machine or does the problem stay with the IDE controller?