the vynsane asylum

So, I accidentally found a bad sector on my drive earlier. I was trying to copy a bunch of pictures, and it kept getting held up on one and giving me a "Cyclical Redundancy Check Error." After doing some digging and following a couple of quick diagnostics, it turns out one picture (luckily one that isn't important at all) is apparently saved in a bad sector.

I can't copy it. I can't open it. I can't view properties on it. I can't even delete it.

Running checkdisk (from the command prompt or from Windows XP) finds absolutely nothing. I defragmented the mofo less than a week ago.

I'm backing up stuff as fast as I can right now.

My question: how best to repair the bad sector if checkdisk doesn't find it? (One site advocated a program called SpinRite, but it looks like they sell the program, so I'm not sure how reputable that is.) And how safe is it to use the hard drive from this point on? Will the problem get worse, or, if I do nothing, will it stay isolated so long as I don't do anything with that file.

Have you tried running a virus scan? It might find it and quarantine it and delete it from there.

It wasn't a virus. Tried that already.

I ran a full checkdisk (didn't realize that it would only run a toned-down version when Windows is running), and it took over an hour. It found something wrong with the file in question, so it can be deleted now. It also found two corrupted music files. One I could tell from the filename what it was and I've already replaced it. The other, well, I can only tell it was a "track 2" from some CD. Which one, I have no clue.