[H] Hard drive read attempts before failure

[Thane Sherrington]

I recall reading back in the mists of time that a hard drive attempts 
to read a sector 36 times before it reported an error to the OS.  Is 
that still (or was it ever) true?  I assume it tries more than once, 
you can tell with floppy disks that the drive tries repeatedly before 
reporting a failure, for instance.

T