Good thinking. Read-only mode is an interesting suggestion. Filesystems allow this as well, and it can allow for the live extraction of data having to resort to professional recovery means (ie. physical and expensive).

I've had times with bad sectors (Deathstar at the very least) where reads would result in complete OS lock up or very laggy situation. That can be solved by only trying so many times to read (though that was on Windows 9x with PATA).