Bad Sectors on a SATA Drive

[Lawrence Houston <houston greenfield dyndns org>]

RHEL3 Users:

Within the last week a RHEL3 Installation starting reporting Bad Sectors 
on its Internal 160 GIG SATA Drive (Seagate Barracuda ST3160023AS in a 
Dell Precision 370n).  During one reboot it dropped itself into the Single 
User Mode due to a Short Read on a Directory which found during a Forced 
Filesystem Check, so I had the Owner Login on the Console and run:

  mount -o ro,remount /
  e2fsck -c /dev/sda5
  mount -o rw,remount /
  exit

The Read ONLY Surface Scan found one Duplicate Directory and 3 Bad 
Sectors.  I am reluctant to run the Surface Scan in the "non-destructive 
read-write mode" since that warns Corruption may Result???

Question 1: RHEL3 does NOT appear to have an Option to complete a Scan for
            Bad Blocks at Installation Time (which I have seen as an
            Option for other Linux Distributions)...  Is that a way of
            forcing RHEL3 to scan for Bad Blocks at Installation Time?

Question 2: Is there any way to have RHEL3 complete a Surface Scan while
            it is still running in the Networked Multi-User Mode (I am
            located 100 Miles away)?  I ask since dropping into Single
            User Mode and Remounting in Read-ONLY Mode to run Utilities
            from the Command-Line on the Console is NOT something the less
            experienced computer users are willing to do on their own!

Lawrence Houston  --  (houston greenfield dyndns org)