I had the same problem with a 3.5 640 Mb Seagate drive; Only thing that worked was to avoid the "bad" area (aprox 90 Mb), so I made a 150 Mb partition at the beginning of the disk, and a 400 Mb partition at the end, the bad area between them; If you have a partitioning software that can create a partition at the and of the disk, there's your solution;
