HDAT2 forum

Hi,

I have a ST380013AS (Seagate SATA 80.3Gb)

The disk failed to boot, reporting a missing or corrupt \SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM. This was the third time over the last two months Ive repaired it, and i decided to do some disk testing.

I ran SeaTools and the long test (surface test) produced no errors.

I ran HDAT2 (newbie), and loaded it up, all tests seem to go ok, I did a File Scan and a Read/Write/Read//Compare test.

My pc speaker went balistic (sounded like a siren) as it reported "Memory buffers are different". It reported this from what appeared to be a evenly spaced gap to create a continous high pitch low pitch sound. I hit ESC to exit.

I booted back into XP from my second functional SATA working HDDsk and from XP the disk now shows as not formatted.

Im concerned the software maybe has a bug in this test with this type of device that has incorrectly reported errors and corrupted the beginning of the disk where the test was conducted (until I hit ESC). I assume it overwrote the sectors in this region.

Hi,

which version of program did you use ?

The bug I will check this week. When it is a bug, I am really sorry.

Any news about this? I suspect that ReadWriteReadCompare has some bug about this, because it is reporting 'Memory buffers are different' errors on drives that im sure are good. And it seems that after such report sector data is corrupted. Using version 4.5.3.

Thanks.

Yes, it could be, but it should not be if you use Ext.INT13h access instead of PCI DMA (bad implementation).

I am too busy at work so I don't have any time to make some improvement
to this program. I cannot say when will be next (maybe better) version, sorry

Thank you for your advice and quick answer. Actually I was using ATA_PIO mode. Next time will try using Ext.INT13h.