[lsc]

>I actually wrote a little C program to recover everything but that one bit (and it was a file I could then recover the missing data from),

'ddrescue' is a program I use in similar situations. (not to discourage you from writing your own; doing that sort of thing leads to a deeper understanding of what is going on.)

[hga]

I was still stuck in Windows (Windows 2000), and it was quite a bit faster to write the program than find a solution on the net like that on a live CD, download it, etc. Having started on C in 1979 (sic) I knew it cold by then.

But, yeah, confirming exactly what was the problem was good, especially since it was extremely odd. All blocks readable except for those 8, although the drive knew it was in trouble.

It reminds me of problems others have reported, especially those using high level error checking file systems like ZFS, where the drive accidentally writes to the wrong location correct data correctly, so the internal CRC passes on reads. The firmware in drives is said to be getting to full OS complexity....