bad block on 3b1. what to do?

[K. Richard Magill]

Thunderstorm.

Sendai crashes.  I power down for a while then try to boot.  It half
boots but fails to come up multi user.  I boot floppy, and start
looking for a bad file in /etc.  inittab is there but not readable.
diagnostics show at least 1 new bad block.

I mv'd the old inittab and kermit'd a friend's and now I'm back up.

Can I declare the bad block without reloading then entire OS?
-- 
rich.