I'm thinking about using the disks that came with my computer to start over.The problem is that scandisk told me that I have 4kb in bad sectors when I ran it last month. My question is, will I have any problems when I re-install everything? I hope I don't have to get a new hard drive just because of 4kb of bad sectors.

4k of bad sectors is very minor. XP flags those sectors and they are not used. In and of themselves they will not pose any danger to your system. However, keep a careful eye and run scandisk regularly. If they start to increase, your harddrive is in the process of failing. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime; Then industry pollutes the water and kills all the fish.

That's good to know. I'll run it more often from now on. But I'm still worried about how these restore disks will know about the bad sectors. I'm not re-installing just Windows. I've had these 4kb of bad sectors for a while now and when I tried to defragment my drive with some utility trialware several months ago, it just stopped and told me to run scandisk. After I did that, the program still couldn't defragment my drive. I'm afraid that the program on my restore disks will just stop or crash when it reaches a bad sector, before it's done restoring everything. Hopefully the program on the restore disks is smarter than that trialware.

bad sectors don't work that way. your install will not stop and crash due to 4k of bad clusters. I beleive when you first install the "examining disks" message is doing just that. It's checking the disk [it tests by doing many writes/reads to that allocation unit. If it fails to read the unit is marked as unusable. chkdsk /f or scandisk /thorough will mark those bad sectors as unusable.

That's great. Thanks for the quick responses. :-)

What the drive does is mark those sectors as bad/unuseable and anything that gets sent to the drive just goes around them like they are not there. No big. You could do a format using the drive makers software and let it lock them out. I may be crazy, but I'm not stupid...