As long as we're on this general subject, let me pose another such problem, also on the Mac.
Norton Utilities keeps telling me that I have a couple of bad blocks on my hard drive that it can't repair because they are in "vital areas" of, I assume, the system software, and recommends backing up everything and reformatting my drive.
The solution in this case seems worse than the problem. Surely I should be able to fix this by booting up from a CD or from OSX (both systems are on my computer, but I don't know if Norton Utilities 7.0 will run under OSX.)
Andrew --
From what you've said I'm not certain _precisely_ what Norton is telling you, but I will comment with a precis of the problem as I see it.
If you have bad blocks then the data in those blocks has been compromised. To put it more technically, if the sector check-sums that have been written for a block do not consistently match (over multiple reads) the calculated check-sums of those sectors' data then either the sectors are inconsistently readable and the data within them cannot be relied upon or the recorded check-sums are inconsistently readable and they cannot be trusted, which is essentially the same thing.
This cannot be corrected without copying the data (in its uncorrupted form) from the suspect blocks onto other, more reliable, blocks. However, a repair program cannot know whether to trust the data it receives from the individual sectors or that from the check-sums, so it has to take the most conservative approach and assume that the data in the individual sectors is unreliable and that the problem is thus insoluble without replacement of the data from a backup. This is generally a very good approach.
Statistically it is far more likely that the information in the bad sectors is compromised than that the check-sums are at fault. And, regardless, data cannot be recovered using the check-sums; it can only be checked for validity. There are programs that will repeatedly read a sector and attempt to write a consensus version to another file, but these programs are for very specific data-recovery solutions and would probably not be useful to you.
If you have bad blocks in the System area (which involves quite a number of files in OS <=9.x and a tremendous number in OS X) then the system will be unreliable. How unreliable it is depends on the severity of the block degradation and the exact code that is affected, but it will eventually cause the system to be unusable.
If your bad blocks are within user files then I believe that the problem can be solved by deleting the problem files, marking the sectors as bad and then reinstalling (a known good copy of) the questionable files. Unfortunately I am unfamiliar with any currently viable program that can mark a sector as bad without a reformat.
The only solution I know for bad blocks within the System area is to reformat (thus marking the blocks as bad {ATA, which is on the iMac that I believe you have} or remapping the bad sectors from the spares{SCSI}) and then reinstalling the operating system.
One way or another a reformat of the drive will probably be required.
What I would personally do: Use Retrospect to backup your entire hard disk. Twice. Restore a few files to make sure your backup works. Boot from the OS X install disk and reformat the hard disk. Restore the entire disk using Dantz's live-restore instructions (n.b. the advice to upgrade your System to its previous state before restoring from backup).
This may not be a perfect solution if your bad sectors are only bad _some_ of the time -- you may wind up restoring unreliable information. There are ways around that pitfall, but they rely on a greater degree of granularity in the analysis of Norton's errors than your question allows. The Dantz live-restore instructions _should_ protect you from most restore problems.
Hope some of this helps,
-=-Dennis
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