Bad sectors or maybe not?

[jferraro]

I have a hard drive which was giving me problems so I ran a chkdsk and it reported 40KB in bad sectors. I then formatted the drive. Now when I run a chkdsk, it reports no bad sectors.

What happened to the bad sectors??

[patio]

It will normally segment them so they cannot be written to anymore...therefore they no longer show up.
They are not fixed...just blocked .

[Aegis]

Will the hard drive now report a different size, or is that a matter of the number of sectors which have become blocked?

[jferraro]

The following topic makes it seem like if the formatting encountered no errors, that it means the drive has no bad sectors:

http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000180.htm

So, now I am confused. How do I tell if hard drive now has no bad sectors or if it now has bad sectors being blocked so that chkdsk reports no bad sectors??