A few weeks ago, I plugged in a new USB device and was rewarded with a blue screen (no, it wasn't an iPod). After the reboot, Windows came back with the "Windows has recovered from a serious error" message but booted and operated normally. I didn't think anything about it for a week until I did my weekly backup (a full drive image) with Acronis True Image 9. A short ways into the image creation process, Acronis reported a read error on a single sector and the Intel Matrix Storage Manager reported a failed array. After Acronis finished creating the image, I used the Storage Manager console to mark the array as normal and ran chkdisk /r (no errors reported). My system has operated normally ever since, except that Acronis always fails to read the bad sector and sets off the failed array warning. The hard drives appear to be fine; SMART is enabled in the BIOS but Storage Manager isn't reporting any SMART errors. Does anyone know how to fix a single bad sector without breaking the array or reformatting? It would be fairly easy for me to rebuild the array (in addition to drive images, I cloned the array onto a single hard drive), but if there's a simple way to fix the sector or mark it as bad so that Acronis doesn't try to read it I like to give it a try. Thanks!

System specs:
E6400 2.8Ghz (7x400)
GA-965P-DQ6
2GB 800MHz CL4
2x160GB Deskstar RAID 0
Radeon X1900XTX
Windows XP Home

Check this site out. http://www.ehow.com/how_113636_fix [...] -hard.html
This might do the same thing as running - chkdsk /r.

I think Norton Disk Doctor(merged into Norton Systemworks, and now in Norton 360) will let you do a surface scan and repair surface defects. Another option(not sure if it supports RAID or not) is to use Spinrite. it is not free however. I have found that it's surface check is much more useful than running a Scandisk/CHKDSK because Scandisk/CHKDSK only do a sector read to determine if the sector is bad. Spinrite actually performs write tests without wiping the drive.

My recommendation is to try Spinrite or Norton in that order.