Attn: Seagate Hdd's

[gumflapper]

hi all

thort i mite share something...

IF ANYONE HAS A SEAGATE BARRACUDA 7200.11 500GB HDD YOU SHOULD IMMEDIATELY BACKUP UR SH1T!

on tuesday night, got home from work, had a drink, sat down, booted up the pc and BSoD! "uncorrectable hardware problem"...

a bit of fault finding found that 1 of my Seagate Barracuda 500GB HDD's wont work. i can hear the drive spinning up and the heads moving but the BIOS wouldnt pick it up...

after a quick google that returned countless forum topics on this situation, ive discovered that there is a firmware problem - a MAJOR firmware problem... apparently (hopefully) the data is still on the disk, but the firmware fu(kup isnt allowing the computer to access the drive at all...

a bit more:

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/9683-seagate...at-doesnt-work/

-- spontaneously after random power-downs, the drives stop being recognized by the BIOS. The highest rates of failure seem to be centered around 500 GB ST3500320AS models

-- a large number of Seagate driver holders have reported that the firmware update has... yes, killed their hard drive

below is taken from wikipedia

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7200.11

Their capacity ranges from 160 GB to 1,5 TB. They support SATAII only. Codenames are Moose (earlier revision) and Brinks (later revision). Their buffer size is 8 MB, 16MB or 32MB.

This family has introduced many firmware(microcode) bugs:

• Disks may not show and utilize all the cache.
  
• FLUSH_CACHE commands may timeout when NCQ is used.
  
• There is a performance anomaly using hdparm with NCQ queue depth 31 in AHCI mode. Speed test measures only 45~50 MB/s (expected: >100~110 MB/s).
  
• Disks may be inaccessible at power on.
  

Disks affected by the last bug will not be detected in the Computer BIOS after a reboot. Numerous users have complained of this and are discussing it in a public forum when discussions in the Seagate forums were subjected to heavy moderation and subsequently closed. The symptom of the problem is that the Computer BIOS will no longer detect the hard disk after a reboot, and upon connecting to the hard disk with a Serial TTL board, this error code will be seen "LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051". Faulty firmware triggers this 'failure', and the hard disk 'disappearances' seem to be happening in the month of November, December 2008 and January 2009 as reported in the forums. Two companies have claimed to be able to resolve this problem using their solution, namely Ace Laboratory PC3000-UDMA (version 4.13) and Salvation Data HD Doctor for Seagate (version 3.0).

In order to fix the first bug, seagate released a firmware update (version AD14) for the affected disk models. In order to fix the second, third and fourth bug, seagate released firmware updates (version SD1A, SD1B, SD2B) for the affected disk models. Owners that have already updated their disks to AD14 have to repeat the process one more time with the latest firmware (version SD1A)!

The SD2B firmware update for Brinks silently removes the DCO ATA feature from the disks while SD1A for Moose adds two ATA features.

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below is the link to the seagate website with the avaliable firmware downloads and a utility to check if your HDD is affected

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...sp?DocId=207931

so far ive tried the firmware update that seagate have provided and for me, it hasnt worked

so yeah, i hope this helps ppl who have this drive...

[R31Nismoid]

Ye just update the firmware and your fine by all accounts if you do it right.

There was a buggy firmware out about 3 weeks ago which causes more problems, but its all A-OK now

[typevu]

phew... just ran my serial on the test and its not affected - 1TB Seagate bought few weeks ago.

[HR31_RB20DET]

Thanks for the heads up, had to update the firmware on my 500gb HDD.

[Trav33]

Weather you have this particular Seagate HDD or any HDD, you should be backing up regularly!

[Reggi34dr]

bought a 1Tb seagate Sept last year and it died on me Nov-Dec last year. It was meant to be my backup drive. I lost everything. It's since been replaced but I havent installed the new drive yet as I'm afraid that it too will die and I'll lose more stuff. So I'll have to check it before using it.

[gumflapper]

bought a 1Tb seagate Sept last year and it died on me Nov-Dec last year. It was meant to be my backup drive. I lost everything. It's since been replaced but I havent installed the new drive yet as I'm afraid that it too will die and I'll lose more stuff. So I'll have to check it before using it.

yeh the drive that shat iself on me was my multimedia drive... i had all my movies, some music, ISO's of apps + heaps of other stuff... and this is no shit, i started burning off my ISO movies about 2wks ago and on the 17th (when it bricked) i was at work and i decided that when i get home i was gonna burn off the remaining... DAMMIT!

now im thinking of going with 2x 1TB Western Digitals in a raid setup of sumsort...