As above, use spotlight to search for disk utility. Select the disk on the left pane and look at the bottom for it's smart status which should hopefully report verified.
Modern disks perform spare 'sectoring' - where bad sectors are found they are ignored and new sectors allocated. In fact, most hard drives have bad sectors, it's apparently pretty much impossible to produce a disk without them, but they are unmapped and not used, thus we don't know about them. Thus if your disk were to 'have' bad sectors, this would suggest rapid degradation and your disk would quickly fail, not the persistent problem you have reported. In any case, get your important data copied and verify disk in disk utility.
Have you tried pressing and holding the letter 'd' when your machine boots? As far as i know the leopard install includes hardware test, if not it's on your installation disk.
I really suggest the Apple support forums where you'll receive better answers than you will here.
Modern disks perform spare 'sectoring' - where bad sectors are found they are ignored and new sectors allocated. In fact, most hard drives have bad sectors, it's apparently pretty much impossible to produce a disk without them, but they are unmapped and not used, thus we don't know about them. Thus if your disk were to 'have' bad sectors, this would suggest rapid degradation and your disk would quickly fail, not the persistent problem you have reported. In any case, get your important data copied and verify disk in disk utility.
Have you tried pressing and holding the letter 'd' when your machine boots? As far as i know the leopard install includes hardware test, if not it's on your installation disk.
I really suggest the Apple support forums where you'll receive better answers than you will here.
