WinDbg: Unable to get verifier list

Kai Harrekilde-Petersen wrote:
Are you using ECC-RAM? I've seen 'unexplainable' crashes on an old
non-ECC machine that was caused by memory corruption. The problem
increased over time until I replaced the system with an ECC-enabled
system.

If you don't use ECC, try memtest86 and/or unplugging some of the RAM
modules.

That was on my list of things to try. Memtest86 is automatically part of
my multi-boot options since I run Ubuntu. However, so far the problem
hasn't really occurred under Ubuntu, just under Windows. Mind you I
don't run Ubuntu long enough on this system to get an adequate idea. The
machine pretty much stays on 24 hours, so it's difficult to take it down
and run a memtest on it for several hours.

Another reason I don't totally suspect it's RAM-related is because the
problems began happening after I installed a new external USB hard drive
to the system. So I'm going to investigate if that contributed to it.

Yousuf Khan

Mark Hobley wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
The Windows crashes are spaced out 3 or 4 days apart, and I can't run
Ubuntu on it for this long to test it. This
particular system is a home server, it runs a few background apps that
are only available on Windows, so it is limited to running Ubuntu only
occasionally, like for example when Windows crashes. :-)

To run a Windows application in Ubuntu:

apt-get install wine


Already have it, and it does run a few apps, which is fine. But not the
one I need it to run (needs access to low-level hardware interfaces).
I've also been looking at getting Virtualbox to run on this thing, but I
don't really have time to get it working at the moment. And regardless,
when you have virtualization, you still need Windows.

Yousuf Khan

Jose wrote:
If you are using the small memory dump you will have that message.

You need to adjust your Startup and Recovery Debugging information to
do a complete memory dump and try again with a new dump file.

Did you get nothing useful from !analyze -v


Okay, I've had another crash, and this time I got a full core dump
saved. It was the following Stop code:

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}
Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )


I can't see anything particularly wrong when I run the Debugger's
"!verifier" command, and get the following output:

1: kd !verifier

Verify Level 9b ... enabled options a
Special pool
Special irql
All pool allocations checked on unload
Io subsystem checking enabled
DMA checking enabled

Summary of All Verifier Statistics

RaiseIrqls 0xd50089c4
AcquireSpinLocks 0x6f16d5ff
Synch Executions 0x0
Trims 0x19e7df6

Pool Allocations Attempted 0x426ff0e3
Pool Allocations Succeeded 0x426ff0e3
Pool Allocations Succeeded SpecialPool 0xddd6d41
Pool Allocations With NO TAG 0x0
Pool Allocations Failed 0x0
Resource Allocations Failed Deliberately 0x0

Current paged pool allocations 0x23b7f for 059076CC bytes
Peak paged pool allocations 0x23b88 for 05910BDC bytes
Current nonpaged pool allocations 0x29871 for 014AED80 bytes
Peak nonpaged pool allocations 0x29888 for 014BF6E4 bytes

However, when I run the "!verifier 3" command, I get what looks like an
endless list of not-freed pool allocations. The list just scrolls off
the debugger window and there isn't enough to time or space to capture
them all. Is this normal?

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Mark Hobley wrote:
Have you changed something on the system?
Has the harware changed?
Has any software been updated? (Beware of automatic updates)

Actually, the only change that I made to the system is that I added a
second external USB HD to it. It had a previous USB HD already attached
to it before, which is still attached to it, but then I picked up a
second one right after Boxing Day. Come to think of it, the first crash
occurred just a couple of days after that.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this new external drive is
somehow to blame, but I don't see why. It's just using a standard
Microsoft USB Mass Storage driver, and so was the previous external
drive. I don't think it could be due to power supply issues as I
upgraded the system's power supply early last year to a high-capacity
Zalman 650W unit.


Yousuf Khan

I've added the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup too, since
it's looking like this is becoming storage-related.

First, so to summarize again, I've now had 5 BSOD crashes on one of my
systems since Christmas. The only change to my system happens to be a
new external USB hard disk that I got after Christmas. The first crash
occurred only a few days after attaching this device, on Dec 30th. The
system previously had a similar external storage enclosure which has had
no problems. They were similar, however the older drive was a 500GB
formatted in FAT32, whereas the newer drive is a 1TB formatted in NTFS.

Secondly, the most recent crash occurred right in the middle of a large
file transfer from one my internal drives to the new external drive.

This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something about this
drive is causing the problem. But I've also been analysing the crash
dumps, and they all implicate either the OS kernel itself, NTOSKRNL, or
the HAL.DLL driver, or the NTFS.SYS driver.

In fact the most recent BSOD was a Stop 0x24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) right on
the NTFS.SYS driver (see quote below):

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}

Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )

So the question is, perhaps USB hard disks formatted to NTFS might not
respond fast enough to the system's liking, since NTFS usually goes on
internal hard disks. Is there some way to increase a timeout or anything
for this drive?

I always wondered why Microsoft bothered to create a new ExFAT file
system, to replace FAT32, when NTFS was already around. This might be
the answer.

Yousuf Khan

Yousuf

See the following
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314477

--
Peter

Please Reply to Newsgroup for the benefit of others
Requests for assistance by email can not and will not be acknowledged.

"Yousuf Khan" wrote in message ...
I've been attempting to get to the bottom of a recurring BSOD crash happening on
my system. I've already had 4 crashes so far over the past two weeks. So I've
identified that NTOSKRNL.EXE is involved in all of them so far. It always
somewhere in the stack. So I enabled Driver Verifier on NTOSKRNL, as well as
HAL.DLL, NTFS.SYS, and FLTMGR.SYS which were also identified on the stack during
various of the events.

Okay so I had my latest crash yesterday, and it occurred on NTOSKRNL as well. The
Verifier was already enabled on the system prior to this crash, and then when go
to Windbg and execute the "!verifier" command, it comes back with the message,
"Unable to get verifier list". Why not, it should be enabled?

When I check them on the command-prompt I get the following output back, and they
confirm that all of the files are being monitored. So can somebody familiar with
Driver Verifier and Windbg help me out here?

Yousuf Khan

***

verifier /query
10/01/2010, 3:30:34 PM
Level: 0000009B
RaiseIrqls: 314843045
AcquireSpinLocks: 1893615496
SynchronizeExecutions: 0
AllocationsAttempted: 90514901
AllocationsSucceeded: 90514901
AllocationsSucceededSpecialPool: 7614086
AllocationsWithNoTag: 0
AllocationsFailed: 0
AllocationsFailedDeliberately: 0
Trims: 2452146
UnTrackedPool: 2872921

Verified drivers:

Name: ntoskrnl.exe, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 83397
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 77485
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 87305
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 77674
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 49624396
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 11791484
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 49827760
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 12139000

Name: hal.dll, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 0
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 4
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 8
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 6
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 0
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 992
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 768
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 32784

Name: fltmgr.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 2
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 7161
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 16
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 7173
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 16
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1166244
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 3440
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1169508

Name: ntfs.sys, loads: 1, unloads: 0
CurrentPagedPoolAllocations: 32443
CurrentNonPagedPoolAllocations: 28514
PeakPagedPoolAllocations: 33133
PeakNonPagedPoolAllocations: 29174
PagedPoolUsageInBytes: 9261776
NonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1880368
PeakPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 9472944
PeakNonPagedPoolUsageInBytes: 1965028

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage Yousuf Khan wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Mark Hobley wrote:
Have you changed something on the system?
Has the harware changed?
Has any software been updated? (Beware of automatic updates)

Actually, the only change that I made to the system is that I added a
second external USB HD to it. It had a previous USB HD already attached
to it before, which is still attached to it, but then I picked up a
second one right after Boxing Day. Come to think of it, the first crash
occurred just a couple of days after that.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this new external drive is
somehow to blame, but I don't see why. It's just using a standard
Microsoft USB Mass Storage driver, and so was the previous external
drive. I don't think it could be due to power supply issues as I
upgraded the system's power supply early last year to a high-capacity
Zalman 650W unit.


Yousuf Khan

I've added the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup too, since
it's looking like this is becoming storage-related.

First, so to summarize again, I've now had 5 BSOD crashes on one of my
systems since Christmas. The only change to my system happens to be a
new external USB hard disk that I got after Christmas. The first crash
occurred only a few days after attaching this device, on Dec 30th. The
system previously had a similar external storage enclosure which has had
no problems. They were similar, however the older drive was a 500GB
formatted in FAT32, whereas the newer drive is a 1TB formatted in NTFS.

Secondly, the most recent crash occurred right in the middle of a large
file transfer from one my internal drives to the new external drive.

Maybe you have some USB disconnects and the NTFS layer gets confused.
As NTFS flushes some data with high priority, I would imagine this can
happen.

This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something about this
drive is causing the problem. But I've also been analysing the crash
dumps, and they all implicate either the OS kernel itself, NTOSKRNL, or
the HAL.DLL driver, or the NTFS.SYS driver.

In fact the most recent BSOD was a Stop 0x24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) right on
the NTFS.SYS driver (see quote below):

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}

Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )

So the question is, perhaps USB hard disks formatted to NTFS might not
respond fast enough to the system's liking, since NTFS usually goes on
internal hard disks. Is there some way to increase a timeout or anything
for this drive?

That should not be the cause. You would need to get USB errors
to cause this behaviour and moybe you have some. It is possible
thet the FAT32 driver is more resilient, also because it is far
mor simple and NTFS is a complexity nightmare.

I always wondered why Microsoft bothered to create a new ExFAT file
system, to replace FAT32, when NTFS was already around. This might be
the answer.

Indeed. Also they have ExFAT better locked down with patents
and hope that people will be stupid enough to adopt it anyways.

Arno

--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

Yousuf Khan wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Mark Hobley wrote:
Have you changed something on the system?
Has the harware changed?
Has any software been updated? (Beware of automatic updates)

Actually, the only change that I made to the system is that I added a
second external USB HD to it. It had a previous USB HD already
attached to it before, which is still attached to it, but then I
picked up a second one right after Boxing Day. Come to think of it,
the first crash occurred just a couple of days after that.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this new external drive
is somehow to blame, but I don't see why. It's just using a standard
Microsoft USB Mass Storage driver, and so was the previous external
drive. I don't think it could be due to power supply issues as I
upgraded the system's power supply early last year to a high-capacity
Zalman 650W unit.


Yousuf Khan

I've added the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup too, since
it's looking like this is becoming storage-related.

First, so to summarize again, I've now had 5 BSOD crashes on one of my
systems since Christmas. The only change to my system happens to be a
new external USB hard disk that I got after Christmas. The first crash
occurred only a few days after attaching this device, on Dec 30th. The
system previously had a similar external storage enclosure which has had
no problems. They were similar, however the older drive was a 500GB
formatted in FAT32, whereas the newer drive is a 1TB formatted in NTFS.

Secondly, the most recent crash occurred right in the middle of a large
file transfer from one my internal drives to the new external drive.

This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something about this
drive is causing the problem. But I've also been analysing the crash
dumps, and they all implicate either the OS kernel itself, NTOSKRNL, or
the HAL.DLL driver, or the NTFS.SYS driver.

In fact the most recent BSOD was a Stop 0x24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) right on
the NTFS.SYS driver (see quote below):

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}

Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )

So the question is, perhaps USB hard disks formatted to NTFS might not
respond fast enough to the system's liking, since NTFS usually goes on
internal hard disks. Is there some way to increase a timeout or anything
for this drive?

I always wondered why Microsoft bothered to create a new ExFAT file
system, to replace FAT32, when NTFS was already around. This might be
the answer.

Yousuf Khan

Don't know if any of this is relevant, but...
I started having file transfer problems when I installed vista.
Network file transfers to/from XP failed randomly, but only when the file
being transferred exceeded ~4MB and was in the middle of a multi-file
transfer. Also seemed to matter which end of the pipe initiated
the transfer.
I couldn't make a vista to vista file transfer fail.

I use totalcommander as my file manager. It has the option to use
file transfer compatibility mode, whatever that is. Doesn't fail in
that mode, so I quit looking for the problem.

I've had usb file transfer failures to external drives when using the
front-mounted ports on my dell.
Hubs are a no-no.
If I look in device manager, I see more entries for root hubs
than for controllers. Don't know exactly what this means, but
sometimes, moving the usb drive to another port helps.

Bus-powered drives are problematic, but I expect your TB drive isn't.
Power supplies that come with external drives are problematic.
Might be worth a look at the PS voltages with a scope under load.

There have been numerous complaints about recent generations of
hard drives in the 1TB range.

NTFS doesn't seem to matter on smaller drives where you can do a
direct ntfs/fat32 comparison on the same hardware.

In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage mike wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Mark Hobley wrote:
Have you changed something on the system?
Has the harware changed?
Has any software been updated? (Beware of automatic updates)

Actually, the only change that I made to the system is that I added a
second external USB HD to it. It had a previous USB HD already
attached to it before, which is still attached to it, but then I
picked up a second one right after Boxing Day. Come to think of it,
the first crash occurred just a couple of days after that.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this new external drive
is somehow to blame, but I don't see why. It's just using a standard
Microsoft USB Mass Storage driver, and so was the previous external
drive. I don't think it could be due to power supply issues as I
upgraded the system's power supply early last year to a high-capacity
Zalman 650W unit.


Yousuf Khan

I've added the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup too, since
it's looking like this is becoming storage-related.

First, so to summarize again, I've now had 5 BSOD crashes on one of my
systems since Christmas. The only change to my system happens to be a
new external USB hard disk that I got after Christmas. The first crash
occurred only a few days after attaching this device, on Dec 30th. The
system previously had a similar external storage enclosure which has had
no problems. They were similar, however the older drive was a 500GB
formatted in FAT32, whereas the newer drive is a 1TB formatted in NTFS.

Secondly, the most recent crash occurred right in the middle of a large
file transfer from one my internal drives to the new external drive.

This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something about this
drive is causing the problem. But I've also been analysing the crash
dumps, and they all implicate either the OS kernel itself, NTOSKRNL, or
the HAL.DLL driver, or the NTFS.SYS driver.

In fact the most recent BSOD was a Stop 0x24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) right on
the NTFS.SYS driver (see quote below):

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}

Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )

So the question is, perhaps USB hard disks formatted to NTFS might not
respond fast enough to the system's liking, since NTFS usually goes on
internal hard disks. Is there some way to increase a timeout or anything
for this drive?

I always wondered why Microsoft bothered to create a new ExFAT file
system, to replace FAT32, when NTFS was already around. This might be
the answer.

Yousuf Khan

Don't know if any of this is relevant, but...
I started having file transfer problems when I installed vista.
Network file transfers to/from XP failed randomly, but only when the file
being transferred exceeded ~4MB and was in the middle of a multi-file
transfer. Also seemed to matter which end of the pipe initiated
the transfer.
I couldn't make a vista to vista file transfer fail.

I use totalcommander as my file manager. It has the option to use
file transfer compatibility mode, whatever that is. Doesn't fail in
that mode, so I quit looking for the problem.

I've had usb file transfer failures to external drives when using the
front-mounted ports on my dell.
Hubs are a no-no.

I find this surprising. I have both used long USB cables
(5m) and USB hubs to transfer large volumes of data.
However that was with Linux, it is possible that Windows
vista / 7 has a very low resilience to USB errors. Linux
does up to 4 (I think) retries and bus reset on disk access
errors, whether it is (S)ATA or USB. If vista / 7 fails
the transfer directly after any error, that would explain
the ibserved behaviour. Long cables and USB hubs make
errors more likely.

If I look in device manager, I see more entries for root hubs
than for controllers. Don't know exactly what this means, but
sometimes, moving the usb drive to another port helps.

That means that there are "virual hubs".

Bus-powered drives are problematic, but I expect your TB drive isn't.

Again, depends. They have a tendency to cause more transfer
errors, but not to unusability, at least not with Linux.

Power supplies that come with external drives are problematic.
Might be worth a look at the PS voltages with a scope under load.

I agree. However I did the scope test with one that caused one
specific drive to have problems and I did see nothing with
a 10MHz 10mV/div (elCheapo, I know) scope. I also played around
a bit with one of these PSUs and it seems some have very little
stability margin.

There have been numerous complaints about recent generations of
hard drives in the 1TB range.

Oh? I have several Samsungs and WDs and no issues. I don't
remember reading more about these or other 1TB drives. Do
you have specifics?

NTFS doesn't seem to matter on smaller drives where you can do a
direct ntfs/fat32 comparison on the same hardware.

So far the advantage I see for NTFS is extended attributes,
i.e. per user permissions. For a single-user machine and
for external drives this is rather irrelevant.

Arno
--
Arno Wagner, Dr. sc. techn., Dipl. Inform., CISSP -- Email:
GnuPG: ID: 1E25338F FP: 0C30 5782 9D93 F785 E79C 0296 797F 6B50 1E25 338F
----
Cuddly UI's are the manifestation of wishful thinking. -- Dylan Evans

mike wrote:
Don't know if any of this is relevant, but...
I started having file transfer problems when I installed vista.
Network file transfers to/from XP failed randomly, but only when the file
being transferred exceeded ~4MB and was in the middle of a multi-file
transfer. Also seemed to matter which end of the pipe initiated
the transfer.
I couldn't make a vista to vista file transfer fail.

Weird. There's apparently a new networking paradigm with Vista and 7
than there was for XP. You need to enable some kind of compatibility
mode to make it work with XP.

I've had usb file transfer failures to external drives when using the
front-mounted ports on my dell.
Hubs are a no-no.

Good point, I just plugged the drives into whatever free ports were
available at the time without much thought. I just now traced them all,
and it looks like the drive was plugged into a hub -- actually both
external drives were plugged into the same hub! I've now rearranged some
wires and put them directly on their own motherboard ports. Let's see if
that helps out.


Yousuf Khan

Arno wrote:
In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage mike wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote:
Mark Hobley wrote:
Have you changed something on the system?
Has the harware changed?
Has any software been updated? (Beware of automatic updates)
Actually, the only change that I made to the system is that I added a
second external USB HD to it. It had a previous USB HD already
attached to it before, which is still attached to it, but then I
picked up a second one right after Boxing Day. Come to think of it,
the first crash occurred just a couple of days after that.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility that this new external drive
is somehow to blame, but I don't see why. It's just using a standard
Microsoft USB Mass Storage driver, and so was the previous external
drive. I don't think it could be due to power supply issues as I
upgraded the system's power supply early last year to a high-capacity
Zalman 650W unit.


Yousuf Khan
I've added the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage newsgroup too, since
it's looking like this is becoming storage-related.

First, so to summarize again, I've now had 5 BSOD crashes on one of my
systems since Christmas. The only change to my system happens to be a
new external USB hard disk that I got after Christmas. The first crash
occurred only a few days after attaching this device, on Dec 30th. The
system previously had a similar external storage enclosure which has had
no problems. They were similar, however the older drive was a 500GB
formatted in FAT32, whereas the newer drive is a 1TB formatted in NTFS.

Secondly, the most recent crash occurred right in the middle of a large
file transfer from one my internal drives to the new external drive.

This is pretty strong circumstantial evidence that something about this
drive is causing the problem. But I've also been analysing the crash
dumps, and they all implicate either the OS kernel itself, NTOSKRNL, or
the HAL.DLL driver, or the NTFS.SYS driver.

In fact the most recent BSOD was a Stop 0x24 (NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM) right on
the NTFS.SYS driver (see quote below):

BugCheck 24, {1902fe, f78beba0, f78be89c, b83fb504}

Probably caused by : Ntfs.sys ( Ntfs!NtfsDeleteCcb+84 )
So the question is, perhaps USB hard disks formatted to NTFS might not
respond fast enough to the system's liking, since NTFS usually goes on
internal hard disks. Is there some way to increase a timeout or anything
for this drive?

I always wondered why Microsoft bothered to create a new ExFAT file
system, to replace FAT32, when NTFS was already around. This might be
the answer.

Yousuf Khan

Don't know if any of this is relevant, but...
I started having file transfer problems when I installed vista.
Network file transfers to/from XP failed randomly, but only when the file
being transferred exceeded ~4MB and was in the middle of a multi-file
transfer. Also seemed to matter which end of the pipe initiated
the transfer.
I couldn't make a vista to vista file transfer fail.

I use totalcommander as my file manager. It has the option to use
file transfer compatibility mode, whatever that is. Doesn't fail in
that mode, so I quit looking for the problem.

I've had usb file transfer failures to external drives when using the
front-mounted ports on my dell.
Hubs are a no-no.

I find this surprising. I have both used long USB cables
(5m) and USB hubs to transfer large volumes of data.
However that was with Linux, it is possible that Windows
vista / 7 has a very low resilience to USB errors. Linux
does up to 4 (I think) retries and bus reset on disk access
errors, whether it is (S)ATA or USB. If vista / 7 fails
the transfer directly after any error, that would explain
the ibserved behaviour. Long cables and USB hubs make
errors more likely.

If I look in device manager, I see more entries for root hubs
than for controllers. Don't know exactly what this means, but
sometimes, moving the usb drive to another port helps.

That means that there are "virual hubs".

Bus-powered drives are problematic, but I expect your TB drive isn't.

Again, depends. They have a tendency to cause more transfer
errors, but not to unusability, at least not with Linux.

Power supplies that come with external drives are problematic.
Might be worth a look at the PS voltages with a scope under load.

I agree. However I did the scope test with one that caused one
specific drive to have problems and I did see nothing with
a 10MHz 10mV/div (elCheapo, I know) scope. I also played around
a bit with one of these PSUs and it seems some have very little
stability margin.

There have been numerous complaints about recent generations of
hard drives in the 1TB range.

Oh? I have several Samsungs and WDs and no issues. I don't
remember reading more about these or other 1TB drives. Do
you have specifics?

Don't know how you missed it. Back around September,
the press was so bad on Seagate .11 series drives in the 1-1.5TB range
that they were practically giving them away. They had a program
for free data recovery if you sent in your permanently-locked-up drive.
Not clear how many
firmware updates they had. Seems that people were not satisfied
that the firmware fix did anything other than throttle the performance.
Interesting coincidence that they also changed the warranty from 5-years
to, I think, three.
I stayed away from that whole mess.

NTFS doesn't seem to matter on smaller drives where you can do a
direct ntfs/fat32 comparison on the same hardware.

So far the advantage I see for NTFS is extended attributes,
i.e. per user permissions. For a single-user machine and
for external drives this is rather irrelevant.

Doesn't fat32 have a 4GB file size limit? Big problem if
you store DVD images or large backup files on your external drive.

Arno