Hi All One of my hard disks continued to develop bad sectors and every time I was using format to mark the bad sectors. Suddenly I got an idea of not only marking the bad sector but also keeping the head from accessing areas around the bad sector. By the time I did this to my hard disks it had only 1 gb of its 2 gb capacity usable. (You can imagine the number of bad sectors!). The bad sectors developed during a three month period. After marking the areas so the read head did not go anywhere near the bad sectors I have been using this hard disk for more than two years without any new bad sector appearing! You can read my experience here [URL]http://members.tripod.com/~diligent/ninelives.htm[/URL] HTH