Maxtor ECC Error Sectors

[Jared]

So I've got a nice old classic 40GB Maxtor drive that ID's and reads fairly well in DE but is getting quite a few ECC error sectors. I know DDI (which I don't have currently) has a feature to read such sectors multiple times and build a composite sector. Have you guys ever found this feature useful in such cases?

Only reason I care is that there's a Quickbooks file, and I'm afraid it may have some such sectors. And I know how sensitive those files are to even slight corruption.

 

[pclab]

Never tested it...

 

[irs]

reading without ECC is possible and DDI will try to match the common results, but this doesn't mean you have right content of sectors.
i personally don't like that feature, i tried and many times i had garbage content in sectors, did you checked translator and defect lists?


bye
Luca

 

[Jared]

Hi, yes the drive is otherwise working fine. No translator issues or anything like that. It's only a few areas that have some clusters of ECC issues. It seems that even PC-3000 is reading them fairly well (definitely not just junk data). But I did spot some English words in a few sectors that had one misspelled character, so I know it's not reading them perfectly.

After quite a few retries, I've cleaned up around half of them. Now I'm just gonna target the important files and see if I can clean up the rest that I need. I was just curious about that feature.

 

[lcoughey]

I consider all ECC sectors all bad and disable the feature in DDI. Might get some useful data from older drives like this, but that is debatable, I guess.