1. Is it possible for S.M.A.R.T. to give false readings (say I was fiddling with lots of recovery programs, transfers, so on and so forth) or is it absolutely a read-only direct correlation to the physical status of a drive?

2. Does SpinRite level 5 "recover bad sectors" operate on those marked at the factory? Are they on the same level as your generic bad sector, with SpinRite thus having full access? (Also I'm curious if SMART's bad sector count is zero'd afterward or if it includes factory marked sectors.)

3. The main firmware of some drives, like a WD Passport is stored on the platter. How is it protected? Is it through marking them as bad sectors? If so, I'm wondering if SpinRite's sector recovery could bring about firmware corruption on these drives.

4. Is the failure of a drive to report valid identity information (hdparm -I /dev/xx) consistent with corrupted firmware, or just general disk failure? I may be misunderstanding the role of firmware here. I feel I've read a drive's identity information is on the platter, just like the partition tables and so on. Is this true?

(Apologizes if this is more appropriate for SuperUser.)