In these daya of 250GB + HDD there is software that recovers data from damaged disks and there is software that attempts to repair the damaged sectors or mark them as bad. But on most damaged disks it is not only the bad sectors that are the problem. What I would like to find is some software that not only marks the damaged sectors as bad but all the setors aroud it that are not 100% (or maybe even if they are 100%) isolating the damaged area of the disk. Does anyone know of such a piece of software? After all on todays large disk who cares if you loose a few gig of disk space!

I agree in an older drive, but in modern drives with large numbers of sectors often I suspect the drive has always had the damage and that some sectors were weak, because the drives are just not that old. the problem with most utilities is they focus on recovering as many sectors as possible rather than cleaning the drive of suspect sectors.

Drive with large capacity would have multiple no of heads and if get bad sectors in your drive then its because one of those heads has gotten weak and the best way to get the drive working is disable the faulty head .