Bad sector in the hard disk

Hi All, I am having Dell Inspiron 1510 with Windows 7 64bit. For the last few months I am having issues with my OS like: *1.* I find "*The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Ide\IdePort0*" error logged into the Event Viewer almost everyday *2.* Almost once in a month my system goes to the "Startup Repair" mode and after some diagnostics it says it was unable to fix the error...