1) friends don't let friends use SpinRite. Just thought I'd have to add it since it was mentioned.-f0dder
I'll second this. From the play around I've had with SpinRite it's a seriously large waste of time IMHO, (and money).
3) the drive *is* damaged. If you can get it replaced under warranty, do so. If you want to get the bad block reallocated, it needs to be written to. A full format of the disk should handle this - even restoring a full disk image should reallocate the sector. But this doesn't fix the problem, you'll likely see more bad sectors later on, and remapped sectors afaik slow things down (because, again afaik, the drive has to seek to it's spare sector pool when serving a request for a reallocated sector - and we all know seeking slows things down).
This would be the first option to try.
But if you want to get down and dirty then you could try the free Russian tool
Victoria, which can do all kinds of wonderful things, (including trashing any data on the drive if you don't know what you're doing -
Consider yourself warned). eg. Remap sectors, read S.M.A.R.T., temperature reading, defect scanning, AAM adjustment, etc, etc.
Here is the translated documentation.
And a link to the page with the
download, (download doesn't work through Google Translate - just click on the filename up the top Victoria 4.46b currently), for the (English) Windows version.
There's also a
DOS version, which is in Russian, and a self-booting version
which I saw on there but can't seem to find again Found it, Russian only, second last link on this
page.
No matter, you can always use the Windows version from a
BartPE.
EDIT: Oh yeah, it does more than HDDs:
...for testing HDD, FDD, CD / DVD, USB / Flash / SCSI drives under Windows through the API and ports...