A proper format may be required when you get bad sectors. If the
system
can write to the drive and clear the blocks (well, the drive pretends, in the background), and the warnings go away, you'll probably be okay. If you keep on seeing error warnings, I wouldn't trust the drive, at all. Those bad blocks could have been the demise of your XP installation.
I assume the error is indicating an end to the life of the hard disk. I did not know about the errors until after completing the Fedora install and reading system mail. I'll have to check the system out more when I'm down that way again.
I like the information Linux provides much more than Windows, too. I had a cheap box that wasn't very reliable, but Windows gave no clues
as
to why. Linux did, however, give me warnings that I could use to diagnose the fault.
Lack of info or not making the errors obvious is what I suspect. I'll know if there are any informative errors if I try to recover the XP installation. The user is bound to want it working again. I see hints of this already.
Jim
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