?hard drive problems--HELP

[Health Sciences Libraries Consortium <lm_net@SHRSYS.HSLC.ORG>]

Help!  Opinion /experience needed!

Background:  I have a 9 station, 2 server Lantastic network.  The
computers are 386sx IBM with 40 meg or 80 meg IDE hard drives.
They are four years old.

Last week, while loading a program, the hard drive made really
obnoxious noises and the system crashed but the hard drive
continued to make noises.  I ran Norton Utilities and did a "disk
scan".  A "bad cluster" was found and marked.  The program (Norton)
said that my hard drive was "phyically damaged" and I should back
up my files.

Yesterday, the technician who repairs our computers told me to
format the hard drive and everything would be fine.  My experience
with IDE hard drives is that when a bad sector shows up more are
forthcoming and that the drive is failing.  My understanding is
that by formatting an IDE drive, one does not actually "mark and
set aside" physical bad sectors.  I need some opinions on this
matter.

Matters to consider--The technician only comes once a month to our
school.  This hard drive is in the computer I use to checkin/out
materials so it sees daily, heavy use.

I need to decide if I should scream for a new hard drive or spend
the time to reformat, etc.

Janet Johns
bbvschlib@hslc.org

I hope this isn't