Hello again, and thanks for the reply. I'm sure you're right about drives, engineers, firmware authors and manufacturers in general. Unfortunately that doesn't help me in the swamp I'm in at the moment. I have half a dozen dead Seagate Barracuda drives on the bench right now. They're going down faster than I can recover them and reinstall, and in some cases the backups are going down while I'm working on the live copies. Most of these drives arrived here in computers bought at different times from different suppliers. It seems I'm a little late to the party on the "BUSY" and "0 Bytes" problems which apparently brought this model of drive into infamy. I only found out about those problems when I became suspicious after finding so many dead 7200.11 drives over the past year or so. I've shipped a few back to Seagate under warrantly and they've been replaced, so I don't know how old most of them were, but in view of the age of the original problems with these drives it seems odd to me that I'm seeing so many problems with them now. The drives I'm having problems with are unlikely to be older than about two years at most, even if the computers in which they arrived had been in stock for some time before their sale. In some cases I know that they're just a few montsh old because they're drives which have been returned to me as warranty replacements. It seems to me that I'm seeing at least one other problem with them which appears to be neither of those original specific and well-publicised problems. I suspect however that it is related, simply because the drives that I am seeing fail are young, they have not been abused, they are Seagate Barracuda drives and the symptoms are not what I would expect for example from damage caused by shock, overheating, faulty heads, disc surface problems etc. As an example, I have a 500GByte 7200.11 drive which was returned to me by Seagate a little while ago as a certified repaired drive. Its warranty expires next January. It failed in service after a few months (while powered up) and now the first 0xB8F6BC000 bytes (approximately 49.65GBytes) is readable with no errors and every read beyond that fails. After some time reading (attempting to read) it, the drive just seems to disappear and I have to power cycle the machine to get it back. These symptoms seem to indicate firmware problems to me, which is why I asked if there's any definitive list of such problems known about the Barracuda drives. Does this ring any bells with anyone? If I can recover the drives without having to RMA them and then have to reinstall everything from scratch it might save me a lot of time. Admin: If this post should be elsewhere please feel free to move it and let me know where. Edited: drive size correction and additional symptom.