fatal disk error

[nieswand at LISBOA.KS.UIUC.EDU]

Help!

A week ago (when I wasn't here), our GTX 220 crashed:
The graphics wouldn't come up and a reboot from the disk was impossible. A  
reboot with a system from tape brought the machine up but still it is  
impossible to use graphics. grcond cannot start. It seems to me (according  
to "header not found" messages in the SYSLOG) that some parts of the disks  
are bad which have been okay for 2 years now.
I guess I have to reformat the disk and update the bad block list, but  
unfortunately I'm not a unix wizard and my knowlegde is rather vague.
Is there any utility to maintain the bad block list automaticly, because  
if at the time of the reformat the block is readable we might run into  
this problem again in a week. otherwise we had to type all bad blocks in  
by hand.
Has anyone done something like this before? And where can I find a good  
description of the formatting procedure, which difficulties will I  
inevitably run into? Please help, I have never done something like this  
before and it's urgent.
              thanks a lot       Benno Nieswand, UIUC