Seagate 7200.11 secondary problems

[davismccarn]

The beginning of this is informational....

Both Vista and XP SP3 have flawed disk drivers. Vista will completely hang on a CRC error which exacerbates a failing HDD and XP, service pack 3, gives "device io errors" if it has fallen back to PIO mode. I do not know how to get these problems corrected; but, add a hard disk drive with other bugs and the mix is disastrous....

Details:

I have two identical data recovery/forensics setups with ASRock 865 chipset motherboards and only one difference; one is XP SP2, the other SP3. I generally use WinHex to sector copy failing drives and have a Promise 133 card so all drives are on their own channel. On the SP2 box, I can copy with no errors excepting the read errors on the source drive. On the SP3 box, I get "device io errors" and timeout errors on the known good drive I am copying to unless I reset the controllers to eliminate the entries leading to PIO fallback mode.

Recently, on a Vista system, what was happening was it would simply stop. You could click on anything; but, the only response would be the spinning arrow (forever!). It was a 7200.11 drive, so I cloned it to another then updated the firmware. Because the drive only reported 11 bad sectors during the clone and no reallocated sectors in SMART, I forced rewrites of the "bad sectors" which fixed the CRC errors, tested it extensively, and put it back in the clients system. That was 6 weeks ago and it has been flawless, ever since.

If you want more details, please ask; but there be bugs in MS land which make a failing drive much worse.

Now, a question.......

Somehow; between the firmware issue and the buggy drivers, these drives can write thousands of "bad sectors" without complaint until power is cycled and then the stuff hits the fan..........

I have a 7200.11, 1TB drive, for example, which reads the last 70% perfectly and the first 15% with trivial problems; but, the range from 15-30% is a nightmare! It will read 10,000 to 150,000 sectors with no problems and then hit a stretch of 10-200 sectors which may take over 12 hours to give up on. Because there is no pattern to the errors that matches any possible physical layout, I have to believe the problems are created by the bugs in both the firmware and the OS. (BTW, I have been doing data recovery since 1979)

Gradius; I have a terminal setup; but, little experience with the Seagate commands. What commands will disable retries and/or tell the drive to ignore CRC errors altogether? (I suspect there is good data in many of the "bad sectors" and it is only the CRC which is wrong)

And, does anyone else have any suggestions or experience with the same problem?