Thanks especially to Dennis Manasco for his technical explanation of my bad-blocks problem.
You are welcome.
The upshot appears to be that I should do nothing, because a) whatever info is in the bad blocks is certainly not compromising my machine's performance and b) I'm going to be waving goodbye to System 9 altogether in about a month, and as far as I know the (so far unused) OSX side of my hard disc is undamaged.
I would still plan on a complete reformat before/when you do your update to Panther. Followed by rigorous checking with Norton (multiple passes with Check for Defective Media enabled) and Disk Utility (and other utilities, if you have them).
(And yes, I too would wait on Panther if I was in your situation, but Phillip makes a good point about booting into X and kicking the tires a little and checking out the various utilities on Version Tracker to get an idea of how to bring X up to your current level of OS 9 personalization. You should probably use System Preferences/Software Update to upgrade your 10.0 to the last version before Jaguar when you do this.)
What I fear is that those bad blocks will come back to haunt you if you don't take steps to fix them.
SCSI disks will remap bad blocks on the fly so it usually isn't much of a problem, and you can always do a refresh of the low-level formatting in an attempt to rejuvenate the bad areas of the disk. ATA disks can only be low-level formatted using factory tools and bad blocks are marked as such in the driver table for the disk rather than replaced.
The upshot is that, unless a utility or the driver adds the blocks in question to the driver table's list of bad blocks, they will continue to be used and cause problems in the future. I _think_ that between them Disk Utility and Norton can accomplish this under OS X. The reason that I would not trust Norton (or any similar utility) to do this without a complete reformatting, testing and restore from backup cycle is that it is likely that blocks physically near the known bad blocks may be partially compromised; a condition that will be revealed by multiple verifications.
(Does anyone else know for _certain_ whether non-OEM utilities can flag bad blocks in the driver tables of ATA disks and whether OEM software modules verify the disk during reformatting and mark the bad blocks?)
Best wishes and I hope this helps,
-=-Dennis
(who likes the consumer-enabled low-level access of SCSI and is fighting tooth and nail -- but with reducing pocketbook -- against moving his new Mac machines to ATA)
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