Windows 7 - hard drive problem. Zero-ing out?

I've recently been having quite a bit of trouble installing windows 7 on a fresh hard drive. I wanted to do a clean Windows 7 install so I deleted all my partitions and began installing on the single unalocated (sp) space. I went away and came back and noticed it in chkdsk and this went on for hours. I let it finish and I have still been unsucsful installing. I used the samsung software to test it and it seems my hard drive over the course of partitioning has developed some bad sectors. (It worked perfectly before doing this) it now does a *click* about every few seconds when doing hard drive intensive things like a chkdsk. I read that zero-ing out the drive could help delete these bad partitions (albeit deleting the memory that had bad sectors)

So, I'm trying to figure out the best way about doing. At first I just tried partitioning around the bad sectors in the windows install screen but I didn't really know how to effectively do this. So I just created a 12GB partition for the Windows 7 install and left the rest unalloacted space. but this didn't work, naturally. So I'm wanting to try zeroing out the harddrive to see if this will remove the bad sectors. Any help would be great. Also, is there a more complicated way of partitioning that I could effectively partition around these bad sectors? Once again I'd like to clarify that my hard disk had NO problems before doing this fresh install.

1. Run a chkdsk /r - not just a plain chkdsk

2. Define a partition of at least 25GB - 12GB is too small for the OS

3. Then install into that partition. Should work.

if the drive is clicking i think thats the first sign the drive dying.
scrooge

How do I run a chkdsk /r? I have no OS and my Windows 7 install doesn't have a repair options to open up a command promt. My vista disk has one but chkdsk /r didn't do anything.

It only did start to click when it did that first chkdsk. And I have a feeling that once I get the OS installed, it would actually work. That's why I'm trying to fix these bad sectors.

You can run the chkdsk from any command prompt of any istallation/repair disk - even a Vista one. But if you already ran chkdsk /r on this disk, no need to run it again.

No, I mean I typed "chkdsk /r" into the command prompt and it doesn't start any test, it basically says the command doesn't work. I'll have to try it again to see exactly what it says.

now it's telling me "bootmgr is missing"

Well, you have to first define a partition. If you run this sequence of commands, it should work:

Diskpart
List disk
Select disk n (where n is the number that was given to the disk in question)
Clean
Create partition primary size=xxx (where xxx is the total number of MBs of the disk)
assign letter=M
Exit

Then you can run:

Chkdsk M: /r (note the blank in front of the slash)

Do I run that in command prompt? Is it all at once? Should I not partition in the windows disk? Also, what about that bootmgr error?