A little background...
I have been regularly backing up my wife's computer with Norton Ghost 14 (using scheduled back-ups) and recently she told me the automatic back-ups had stopped. When I investigated this error, Ghost reported that there are bad sectors on the hard drive. I ran chkdsk with repairs. That didn't help with the bad sectors (according to Norton Ghost error messages). I know that I can check the box in the advanced settings to ignore bad sectors during the back up. I have done that just to make sure that she has a working back-up. I also randomly found some pictures (JPG's) in her "My Pictures" folder that used to be viewable but now aren't. She has been having some other random software problems on her computer where programs lock up. Because of that and the Norton Ghost error messages, I decided to do a complete reformat of her hard drive and reinstall the OS from scratch (NOT re-image the drive). While doing the re-format, when I deleted the partitioned space and created a new partition, I noticed that there was an additional 10 GB of unpartitioned space that I could not get lumped together with the rest of the hard drive. My assumption for this was that it was due to the "Bad Sectors" of the hard drive. After re-installing the OS and most of her software applications from scratch (including Norton Ghost), and before I brought in any backed up data, I tried to do a "Ground Zero" image back-up with Norton Ghost. The same "Bad Sectors" error message came up again. She has a Dell Laptop that is under warranty so I will most likely be asking for a new hard drive, but this situation has brought up several questions which are as follows:
1) How can I check to see if there are unrepairable bad sectors on the hard drive (besides the chkdsk utility)?
2) If this error message is coming up repeatedly from Norton Ghost, then is that a strong sign that the hard drive is about to go bad? (My educated guess is yes.) 
3) If that 10 GB of unpartitioned space is not a result of the bad sector, is there a way to lump together that into the single partition "C" drive?
4) If I re-imaged a new physical hard drive with the back up that had the bad sectors skipped, would that affect the new hard drive in some way? i.e. Would it simply not install the missing data or would the new hard drive now have a fragmented layout (for lack of a better term) reflecting the image Norton Ghost took last?
Thanks in advance!!
=======
Brian Hall