>IDE drives has sector remapping automatic in hardware.
>if you get read errors your drive is seriously broken or at least drive
>does not remapped it yet.

Right; I'm hoping to limp along until a new drive comes in.

>try backing up data, doing
>dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rwd0d one or more times.
>
>most IDE drives remap sectors on faulty writes

Uh, well ... that would completely zero out the only disk in the machine,
wouldn't it?

--Ken