Maxtor ECC Error Sectors

Jared

Administrator
Staff member
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.
 

irs

Member
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

Administrator
Staff member
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

Moderator
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.
 
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