Disable SMART warnings?

I have a VAIO laptop that mysteriously (looks around) developed bad sectors after a trip to China. Maybe the X-Ray machines nuked it? Whatever the reason, Scandisk and Format both take an excessively long time trying to mark the bad sectors (I had it going for 2 days before the power went out... aaargggh!!!), so as a quick remedy I reassigned the Extended partition to use all but the last 700MB of the drive (which is about where the errors start to occur). However, now whenever I turn the computer on, I get a warning message like "SMART failure predicted on drive IBM-xxxxx. Replace drive immediately... blahblahblah" but since this is just a backup computer I really don't want to spend money on it until the hard drive actually dies. I would, however, like to get rid of the boot-up error message. I tried checking the BIOS but there aren't even any options for enabling/disabling SMART, much less SMART error messages. I believe it's using the Phoenix AMIBIOS. If possible, I could also use a program that can mark bad sectors quickly (well, now I need a formatter too), as there was still plenty of good space left in the dead zone. Any help is appreciated...