[Riverglen]

I installed the latest version of Ubuntu on my HP laptop this evening. The new version includes a disk monitoring utility and when the installation completed it reported that the hard disk had "many bad sectors". The report details indicated a Rallocated Sector Count of 65540!

I rebooted into Windows and used the System Info For Windows utility to review the SMART data for the drive, and got the same number. Specifically, the Reallocated Sector Count for the drive reported the following values:

Absolute Value - 100
Worst Value - 100
Threshold Value - 5
Raw data - 0x10004 ( = 65540)

Surely this must be spurious? The machine has been completely trouble free, and there are no other indications of problems, as far as I can tell. Is this a false alarm or a pending disaster?