You are correct.

A bad sector is simply mapped out. If I had a drive that was getting bad
sectors occasionally I'd definately get rid of it

Somewhere on teh intarweb "kony" typed:

Yep. I have Spinrite 6.0, AFAIK the latest version. However, it can't find
any "mass storage devices" attached to my ICH9r southbridge. Neither could
Seatools which resulted in me RMAing a 500 GB HDD last week as the
S.M.A.R.T. analysis that comes with Speedfan gave the message below:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Your hard disk is a ST3500320AS with firmware SD15.
Your hard disk is not in the current database.
Your hard disk's temperature is 27C.
New hard disks are added as soon as valid statistics can be computed.
Come back soon to check your hard disk against a new database.

(It's in the database now, the report that this was taken from was generated
two weeks ago. Kept for the purpose of arguing the point if they don't
accept that it was faulty.)

NOTE : your hard disk has 1 pending sectors. Those are sectors that couldn't
be properly read and that the hard disk logic is waiting for a write
operation to try to remap to a spare sector (if available). According to the
Reallocated Sector Count attribute, your hard disk seems to have available
spare sectors. A simple disk surface scan won't be enough to force the remap
operation. You need a read/write surface scan to remap the sector. The best
option should be a tool that knows about what should be read from that
sector so that it has some option to apply the best fix to the missing data.

NOTE : your hard disk has 1 offline uncorrectable sectors. Those are sectors
that an offline scanning found as unreadable. Offline scanning is a process
that can be automatically started by the hard disk logic when a long enough
idle period is detected or that can be forced by some tool. Those unreadable
sectors are identified and the hard disk logic is waiting for a write
command that will overwrite them to try to remap them to spare sectors (if
available). According to the Reallocated Sector Count attribute, your hard
disk seems to have available spare sectors. A simple disk surface scan won't
be enough to force the remap operation. You need a read/write surface scan
to remap the sector. The best option should be a tool that knows about what
should be read from that sector so that it has some option to apply the best
fix to the missing data.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Also I'd get reproducable BSOD whenever I tried to access data on a
partition on the drive. I even narrowed it down to a specific file. If I
tried to 'read' it... BSOD. I'm waiting to see if the NZ Seagate agents
accept that the drive was faulty (they sent me a replacement out first) and
*don't* charge me a restocking fee.

I could have set it as a slave in my testbed (which runs a PCI - SATA card
that Spinrite works fine with) and remapped the sector but I'd noticed when
I was cloning the old HDD onto the new one that it seemed to vibrate more
than I'm used to with Seagates. I didn't see the point in temp fixing
something when it'd probably just happen again.

Speedfan's S.M.A.R.T. tool is excellent. I have another drive in this PC
(that carries my programmes partition and also a data partition) that has
given the following report consistently for over a year now:

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Your hard disk is a ST3320620AS with firmware 3.AAK.
Your hard disk is not in the current database.
An hard disk with the same model, but with a different firmware was found:
The average temperature for this hard disk is 38C (MIN=30C MAX=48C) and
yours is 30C.
New hard disks are added as soon as valid statistics can be computed.
Come back soon to check your hard disk against a new database.

(Interestingly I've "been back" lots and this drive has never been added to
the database.)

NOTE : your hard disk has 17 reallocated sectors. Hard disks do have spare
sectors (usually from 256 up to 1024) used to replace bad ones. This
remapping operation is transparent to the end user. Anyway, this can lead to
degradated performances (because remapped sectors are in different places of
the disk than the original ones and the head needs additional moving). If
reallocated sectors grow over time, you might encounter some serious
troubles. A backup of the most important data is suggested anyway.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

That figure of 17 reallocated sectors hasn't changed in over a year. I'm
beginning to think it was like that from new. Regardless, I'm looking to
replace it when I can afford to and relegate it to data-only duties as it
could be slowing down programme load-times. These new ST3500320AS drives are
awesome. A lot faster than the ST3320620AS (according to HDTach) as well as
being around 3 - 4°C cooler. They're also the cheapest per-gigabyte HDDs on
the NZ market at the moment at NZ32c/GB. Not bad for a speedy Seagate drive
with 32Mb cache. LOL, I just need to 'find' the money now.

Cheers,

Of unknown brand?

Of unknown title?

What use isn't it?

That is exactly what you want to do if a drive has bad
sectors.  If a sector is bad, can't be read, by definition
not being read means there is no data recovery but you want
those sectors marked as bad so they aren't potentially used
in the future which might cause some (or more) data loss.

What ideal solution did you expect the software to
accomplish instead?  Magically make a bad sector good again?
If it were possible with a simple software logic routine,
wouldn't the drive already incorporate this in it's
firmware?  To some extent it does, it remaps bad sectors
until there are no spares remaining.

If you merely want to test bad sectors to see if they are
only logically bad, many OS scanners can do this and recover
use of the bad sector.  There is still a problem remaining
in doing that, why the sector was marked bad in the first
place... either there really is a problem with it, or a
problem with another part of the drive, disk subsystem, or
system in general that needs fixed before the filesystem
integrity can be assured for regular use.