HARD DRIVE BAD SECTOR TOOL (wish)

Hello!

I want to make old harddrives of reasonable size (20gig or more) USABLE AGAIN.

Since a nice windows XP version (e.gb. "stripped to the bone edition") is sufficient for an "internet surfing" machine and there are more old computers than know what to do with...

I am looking for a tool that

- works under DOS (or Linux preferably knoppix)
- and tests a HardDrive
- and marks sectors as BAD (**PLUS** neighboring sectors)

like so:

it goes through a freshly formatted partition FAT32
and ON THE SLIGHTEST DELAY (re-read) ... it OCCUPIES THE SECTOR ..
**AND 50 NEIGHBOURING sectors** with a file

in order to avoid windows using this area of the Hard Drive.

BOTTOM LINE:

I don't care if the drive looses a gigabyte or three.
As long as it works FAST and TROUBLE FREE.

Yes, I know, this can not be quaranteed, and YES I KNOW that HDDs - once having developed badsectors - will go worse.

YES, I still want to work with "bad " drives.. I have quite a few of them.
YES, I have time to monitor and play. I have more time than money.

==========

Here the results of my google-ing

http://www.google.com/search?q=sectors+bad+neighboring

"ADRC Data Recovery Tools
To reduce the number of tedious retries, whenever a bad sector is encountered, the program will intelligently search the neighboring sectors to determine the extent of bad blocks and mathematically calculate the number of retires needed."

My ideal tools does not "calculate" it simply GERNEROUSLY marks sektors as bad,
taking

Stumble It!