So, my old 80gb HDD failed yesterday, after a good 5 years. So I replaced it with a 160gb SATA (through a SATA/IDE convertor). Now this drive has double the bad sectors of the other one, which doesnt really bother me much but i was wondering if there was a way to "block" them from being used in the future? I dont wanna recover anything from them, as there "shouldnt" be anything there...

A full format will mark the bad sectors as bad so they are not used. You can also run chkdsk /r on the disk.