Some bad sectors are always expected on a drive. I could count the number of drives on one hand I have seen that were brand new and had no entries in the p-list. Drives transparently handle bad sectors the issue is when they begin to grow too fast. It may well appear to the user that there are no bad sectors due to remapping those sectors, but with the tools to read the p-list and g-list, you see just how many there are. The p-list is the 'permanent list' of bad sectors, those that were identified even before the drive left the factory. The g-list is the 'grown list' of defects, those that the drive fixes on the fly during it's ooperational life. Trust me, if you could see that and wouldn't use a drive with bads, you would go through a LOT of drives till you found what you are looking for. The problem is, bads are ONLY remapped when written to. If data already exists when the sector is found bad in a read operation, the drive cannot move the data because it cannot guarantee the data will be read in a useful manner. There are utilities like MHDD that handle this, but chkdsk and most drive utilities do not handle it at the physical layer, and only add it to the OS table, which is wiped clean next time the drive is formatted