[ILUG] Disk crash

[Aidan Keady]

Hi,
   My laptop's disk is crashing in a big way - it was OK 'til yesterday evening
when it decided that the Linux partition had reached its mount limit and ran
fsck on booting.   Anyway, this ran into a lot of problems that it couldn't
fix and prompted to run fsck manually.   This I did, which seemed to fix a few
things but it's just as bad - "short read" errors and the like.   The only way
I can get at anything on the drive is to use the SuSE CD-ROM to boot into
"rescue" mode and mount the partition.   In this way, I copied the only important
files (my thesis, which I was hoping to finish in the next week ;( ) to a DOS
partition, which is OK, according to scandisk.   It's not a calamity, therefore,
as I should be able to transfer anything useful to another PC (which has an
almost-up-to-date copy of the thesis anyway - I'd been syncing the two versions
every couple of days).   I tried using fdisk to delete the partitions and make 
them again and reinstall Linux but I still run into the boot problems.   I had
assumed this would do a format and map any bad sectors, but I guess it doesn't.
What can I do to fix the disk?   Or any recommendations for a cheap source of
2.5" hard drives if it's terminally ill?

Thanks,
ATB,
Aidan.
(taking a weekend away from computers after last night's trauma ;)