Continue using my crappy 20Gb harddisk

My 20Gb portable harddisk was serving me few quite some time ever since I yanked it out from my Compaq Presario 1720 US harddisk. Probably because of being used a portable harddisk with a lot of connect-discounnect-and-connec-again, the harddisk gain some bad sector. In order to regain as much usable space from the harddisk as possible, I have to create partitions that skipped over the bad sector part. Since I have no simply way to know where the bad sector is (notice that I said easy way, which rules out those crazy sophsticate harddisk tools like SpanRite 6 or such), I use the Disk Management feature of Windows XP (under Computer Management console) to create partition. If the tool got stuck during the formatting partition, I simple stop the formating and create a partition that avoids the problem part. I continue doing that until I have a partition that formats at normal speed and complete within reasonable amount of time (say 10 minutes). Now I have 5.8 Gb, and then 2.44G of dead zone, and then 6.06Gb, and then 1.5Gb of deadzone, and finally 2.77Gb. Let me see how longer I can continue using this harddisk.