Are there any freeware programs which can fix bad sectors?

If the sectors are really bad.. there is nothing on earth that can fix them... free or not.

And the only Utility I would trust to find which ones were marked defective in error... or recover data... isn't a free program.

NONE of the freeware I've ever tried is worth the time it took to download... nor most of the commercial ones either for that matter.

Buy it... spend the money... its worth every penny. Its called Spinrite.

Spinright 6t from GRC (http://www.grc.com/cs/prepurch.htm) is the best I have found it is $89.00 and well worth it.

Yep... thats the one... Been using it since version 1.0... thats a LOT of years.. Worth every penny.. and good to run at least once a year even if you don't have problems you know of yet. I've tried many others over the years ( I have my sources)... nothing else has ever come close. It's the only one I would recommend to anyone.