Shouldn't this work? dd command issues.

I'm hoping to bring together a hodge podge of old parts lying about into a sweet smoking Arch machine.
I've got everything I need, except what I thought would be the easiest part of the whole box... a usable hard disk.
After finding two reasonably new disks, I threw them in the set up I had at the time, everything was peachy-keen.
Turns out, both disks flop with IO errors after about 36hour uptime, I think they have  bad sectors.... maybe I dreamt this, but I thought
hard-disk firmware hides bad sectors from the OS by remapping them... maybe not. 
Anyways  I want to zero both disks, forcing the sectors to be remapped or quarantined off or w/e the manufacturers have them do. 
So I booted the box up with my trust Arch install disk, booted the live cd and am sitting here at the root prompt
trying to run
dd of=/dev/sda if=/dev/null bs=512
the above returns the stats of execution:
0+0 records in
0+0 records out
0 byte (0 B) copied, etc.
Is the above bash not attempmting to do what I think it is?
plz halp! Thanks for reading.

Thanks for the reply and the information,  the changed made everything work
Totally bogus that a 500GB Wester Dig harddrive made in 2009 would have so many bad blocks.....
What usually produces a bad block, a hard kill of a system?

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