One of my drives is showing a bad block error whenever I try to
clone the drive using an old Ghost from Norton.

And I've had the check disk 'reindexing' routine run where Win XP checkdisk runs an extenended procedure which seems repeated at each clone/copy run. Please say what these things mean.

The MHDD manual says that the wipe process can eliminate software bad blocks. Is this a way to clean the disk of these errors? How will future cloning jobs run?

Also, since MHDD is available as a cd image, is it best or necessary to
copy to the boot drive before working on the problem drive? I ask because the logfile has to be written to some location. Both my units are Western Digital SATA for this operation.

System under discussion

AMD Athlon II x3 450 Regor 3.2 Ghz
MSI 880GM-E41 mainboard
Kingston DDR3 Hyperx/fb 2x2Gb
Seagate Baracuda 160Gb IDE HD
Logisys 480w Power supply
USB mouse
corded keyboard
using onboard video by ATI

That is not MHDD-specific. Any modern hard drive will put any bad or dying sector into its "suspect" list upon reading failures. Whenever you try to write to that sector again (during a wiping process, for instance), that means you don't care about the data it contains anymore, so the HDD will simply discard it and use a spare one for that location (if possible: if there are any spare sectors left, etc.).

In running the prog for the first time I realized that it could not find my SATA drive. My system list has changed HD's over time and I apologize for the error.

Can I use HDD Low Level Formatter to resolve the problem? Will the low level program examine these things to refresh the disk? Previously when reinstalling my Win XP I have asked for a new NTFS format before installing the OS but have not done any low level wipes.

Also I have a concern about low levels wiping too thoroughly where the
drive is unusable. Certain security wipes seem a problem. IOW I have received so-called security wipe drives that were hard to format. But that is another issue.