[NTLUG:Discuss] Repairing?? bad disk sectors in Linux?

[John K. Taber]

I'm not sure of terminology, so bear with me.

I'm running a dual boot system, with Windows XP SP3 on the first drive,
which I recently had replaced. And I'm running FC 6 on a second drive. 

Before replacing, I used Seatools to check both drives. The Windows drive
had to be replaced. The FC 6 drive also had an error, but not fatal. 

The FC 6 drive fails the short disk test, which I gather means a bad sector
(I could be wrong).

Now, how do we handle disk errors (not file errors, disk errors) in Linux?
Is there a Linux command, or a utility that will find the bad sector, and
remove it from use? In other words, something similar to Windows disk tools.

Or is finding and bypassing bad disk spots something done under the covers
in the Linux world.

And how about defragmenting? In a real operating system, defragmenting is
done by the OS in spare moments. Does Linux work like that? I would assume
so, but I don't know.