John Corliss wrote:

Is there any way to get around this and simply block the bad sectors?

The bad sectors are probably too severe for the system to read/write. It
usually take a number of retries before finally decides whether it's
acessible (good) or inaccessible (bad).

You might want to use a linux LiveCD to format it, since you may configure
the number of access retries.

For disk/platter based drives, bad sectors can be either weak sectors or
physical damage (scratches).

Weak sectors can be fixed by writing the sectors a number or times, but
they may appear again on different sectors. This may indicate that the
drive has reach its usage limit or it's just a bad design (usually on
specific model only).

Physical damage however, is not fixable. In fact, they can spread due to
disk being rotated. Scratch particles can stick to the disk head and as
the head being moved to other tracks, it can scratch those tracks too.

For any type of bad sectors, I suggest you make a backup of the files on
that drive which aren't already backups and get a new drive.