[Techtalk] Faster badblock scans?

[Julie]

Does anyone know of a faster way to scan IDE drives for bad blocks?

Failing that, does anyone know of a way to turn bad block reports
in /var/log/messages into numbers I can feed to fsck from time to
time?  I'm running e2fsck -c on a 40GB partition right now and it
looks like it's going to take 10 hours to complete.

Better still, when is someone going to fix ext[23] so that it
automatically flags bad blocks when it finds them?  I'd love to do
it myself but IBM says I can't ;-(
-- 
Julianne Frances Haugh             Life is either a daring adventure
txjulie at austin.rr.com                  or nothing at all.
					    -- Helen Keller