<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 1:27 PM, Jay Ashworth <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jra@baylink.com">jra@baylink.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="im">
</div>I, too, have, sadly, had much bad luck with Seagates, from 500GB up to 2TB,<br>
failing in much less than the expected life, and all, uniformly, in a very odd<br>
way which I've mentioned before here:<br>
<br>
once you hit a block in the Red Zone, the drive adapter goes completely off<br>
line, never to return until you power-cycle the drive, which of course<br>
generally means the machine.<br>
<br>
If you never hit a block in the Red Zone, the drive works fine.<br>
<br>
Obviously, given the cycle time, this makes them effective impossible<br>
to work around, even if you could theoretically do so; DDrescue is<br>
likewise useless, since "real" reverse read isn't implemented in that<br>
program, and the author declines to do so.<br></blockquote></div><br>I had the Seagate 7200.11 500GB on my Windows machine fail suddenly last summer in a similar fashion -- most blocks read fine, but hitting a bad block rendered the entire drive offline until power cycled. I ended up recovering most of the data using a Linux <br>
<br>- Putting the drive on a USB->SATA adapter (which are cheap) helped a lot; each time the drive became non-responsive I just unplugged and plugged it back in; the LiveCD Linux session remounted it as a hotplug just fine. I discovered that shortcut after spending several hours rebooting the whole machine :-(<br>
<br>- There are at least 2 different programs written by different people, ddrescue and dd_rescue -- the latter has a reverse option, at least in later releases. Confusingly, some of the dd_rescue web pages' references call it "ddrescue" also...<br>
<br>- For Windows recovery, it ended up being much easier to create an NTFS partition on a new drive and have the Linux session mount to that and write the rescue image than to have Windows mount an ext* partition. Even found Windows freeware to mount the image file to copy the files (although even easier to mount the image in the Linux session and cope the files from there).<br>
<br>But I agree, that Seagate failure mode is particularly horrible, and renders many of the other rescue programs I tried useless.<br><br>Josh<br><br>