bad sectors question - plz help

[aniv3]

I have an 80 GB HD (WD80) and I've recently discovered that I have a bad sector of about 16KB...

about this particular bad sector, should I disregard it, considering it's small size, or do somethin bout it??? (tell me what)
and in general -
how are bad sectors created? what can I do about them? and can they spread spontaneously?

 

[HammerBot]

I really dont hope this is symtomatic of the quality of the WD drive, since I just purchased two of them.

I have a bad sector of about 16KB

Well in that case you have about 32 bad sectors since a physical sector is 512 bytes.
Anyway, a few bad sectors is in general not a problem, since they can be marked as bad, so the OS dont use those. However, usually bad sectors are caused by mishandling the drive (transportation etc.). In that case you have a physical scratch on the platter and then you can get more bad sectors over time, since a scratch has side effects. Usually you can not do anything about bad sectors. A low level format can attempt to reclaim those sectors, but I have never seen any sector being reclaimed succesfully.

If there still is warranty on the drive you can attempt to get it replaced. But I dont know if the vendor allow a certain amount of bad sectors (like LCD screen manufacturer allow a certain amount of dead pixels before they replace it)