can reinstalling windows xp in this situation help?

[goo]

well this is the main question i want to ask. can reinstalling windows xp help clear the problem or do i have to reformat?

this is the situation:
1. i have two physical drives, 80, and 200 GB. both drives are split into two partitions.
2. the 80 gb drive is split into 40 and 40. these are drives C and D. the primary master.
3. the 200 gb drive is split into 80 and 120. these are drives J and K. this is a primary slave drive.
4. both has windows XP installed on their first partitions. i am running the windows on drive J now. and this windows is running fine.
5. the C drive has developed (is it the word?) bad sectors, and when i enter windows, the zone alarm client says folder C:\windows\system32 is corrupt and unreadable. yes i can log onto windows on drive C but zonealarm wont start. the os also freezes for a few seconds, then continues.

now, i have no problem wiping the drive clean (drive C) of all data, as i have backups. the problem is this:

1. if i reformat drive c, then i wont be able to boot to this windows on drive J right? since the boot.ini file is in drive C, the primary master.
(note: i tried that once on a computer with windows and linux installed, and the windows got bad so i reformatted drive c and now you cant boot to linux without a boot disk. but the linux is still installed on that other drive.)

I have a copy of windows XP on my machine, so i can run installation of Windows XP from this OS (drive J), and choose drive C as the installation path. will this fix the problem? will the installation of windows automatically skip the bad sectors and not write to that?

if you know any other solutions please tell me. but if possible, i dont want to switch this drive (drive J) to primary master, its too much of a task. and im pretty sure theres gonna be problems with my data here, as they refer to drive J as the "C" drive. thanks guys.

[liljim]

The first thing i would do is boot to your c: drive in safe mode. Open My Computer, right click C and select properties. Click the tools tab and under error checking, click the check now button. Tick both boxes to fix file system errors and attempt to fix bad sectors. Click start and let it do its scan. When its complete, reboot back into c: in normal mode and click start>run. Type in sfc /scannow, you will be prompted for your xp disk so have it handy. Reboot when its done and test it out. Hopefully it will help but let us know the result.