Bad day at the office - disk help needed please

I know how you all love horror stories, so for what it's worth, here's my sob story for the day. The good news (if there can be such a thing) is that I have a (hopefully) reliable backup of my data as of the end of last week. The bad news is that my Seagate laptop hard-disk is currently 78% through a full diagnostic check and reporting over 20 bad sectors so far. Now I always thought that running a disk check would ensure that Windows wouldn't use bad sectors on a disk - I had a problem like this a few weeks ago, and felt that a disk check would suffice. However, I "lost" (they're on backup) some VHD files for some virtual machines this morning plus a few other miscellaneous files. Windows was reporting event id 7 in the event viewer.

So, to all those hardware knowledgeable people - do I chance the Seagate diagnostics to remap the drive to not use the bad sectors, or am I doomed to failure with this drive. I don't particularly want to rebuild, although I do fortunately have a partition backup for the boot & system partition, so restoring to a new drive could be useful. Also, do I go for something like the new "Momentum" 7200 100GB Seagate laptop drives - not that I could find a UK distributor for these or is there something even faster? Big and fast is my only real criteria - if they did 500GB 15,000 RPM Ultra-320 SCSI hard disks for laptops, I'd be there like a shot, but sadly I'm stuck with ATA-100....

PS Make that 33 bad sectors now :-(