Here's what that means. The surfaces of the hard drive platters are divided into sectors. This is where the information is stored. However, occasionally a certain sector can go bad. It's normal. It's a standard "wear and tear" sort of thing. The HDD manufacturers know that these sectors can sometimes die so they include "backup" or "replacement" sectors with the HDD. Basically a small portion of the HDD that is sectioned off so you can't normally access it. It's usually between 100 and 200 spare sectors. When it detects a sector goes bad, It tries to copy the data over to one of the "backup" sectors and then it allocates that sector as a part of the partition. This is completely transparent to the user. The system does this automatically. You can also use chkdsk /r to do it manually. But If all of the spare sectors are used up, then you get problems. You will find that you will get I/O errors when reading certain files, files may get corrupted suddenly, etc. No, you cannot repair the HDD. The best thing you can do is backup the HDD. The only reliable way I find to backup a damaged HDD without windows just giving up when it gets errors is using DD. It is a tool built into linux that does a bit-for-bit clone of the entire hdd. EVERYTHING. Even the partition data. Here is how you do so:
DISCALIMER: this will erase the destination/new hdd.
Get a Linux live disk. Linux Mint works great and is not a huge download. Boot off the linux live disk. Make sure you are connected to the internet. Open the web browser to make sure. Open a command line. On most linux systems this can be done by pressing Ctrl+Alt+T. If that doesn't work, search through the menu for a program called Terminal or something like that. Type "sudo bash". If prompted for a password, just press enter(assuming you are using linux mint. If you are using another distro, you will have to find out what the pasword for that is.) Type "apt-get update" Type "apt-get -y install pv" Type "apt-get -y install gparted" Type "gparted" This will open a disk utility program. Using the drop-down on the top-right of the program, figure out which hard drive is your old hdd and which is your new hdd. You can figure it out by looking which hdd has a windows partition. The new hdd should be blank. Write down which hdd is which. DO NOT GET THEM MIXED UP! Or you will erase your entire hdd. It should be something like /dev/sda and /dev/sdb but make sure.
Type "dd if=<oldhdd> | pv | dd of=<newhdd>" replacing <oldhdd> with the device id of your old hdd and <newhdd> with your new hdd. For example, if your old hdd was /dev/sda and your new hdd was /dev/sdb, then you would type "dd if=/dev/sda | pv | dd of=/dev/sdb". Your drive is now being cloned. It will tell you the speed of the clone and how much it has transferred so far. It will take a LOONG time. Your new HDD will be EXACTLY the same as your old hdd. All your files will be there, and you will be able to boot off it just like always.
This is the most reliable method I know, although it is slow and cumbersome. Alternatively, you could try WinDD which is a windows tool to do the same thing, but I have never used it before and cannot guarantee that it will work. I personally would just use the linux method.
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