Decato | 20 Jan 2009 - So, the recent big bad news around the web is about batches of Seagate’s 7200.11 HDD failing at a very high rate. Seagate already announces for those failed HDD, they’ll be providing FREE (don’t get conned by your salesperson) data recovery on top of HDD replacement. So what about those of us who has the same batch of hard disk that’s yet to fail? Seagate kindly provided firmware update to fix the problem, so that some of us don’t have to go through the pain of ripping it out, not having access to our data, eternally waiting for RMA return. You can head here for the firmware, but please, stay a while.. and liste.. err I mean read more.
Since I do have a Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB, I decided to check if my HDD is among the batch affected. Well turns out I am, so I decided, what the heck, let’s just get this over with so that I don’t have to worry about it failing in the future. My HDD, ST3500320AS with firmware version SD15. The new firmware, SD1A, comes in a 1.5mb ISO file, which you’re suppose to burn to a CD, and boot from there. It boots into freedos, auto executed some batch file and you can just select your HDD model and it’ll proceed. Sounds pretty easy right? Everything seems smooth… NOOOOOOOooo !! BIOS detected primary HDD failure after reboot!!! I mean… WTF???!!!?? I started googling (more than 1 PC is good) and found on the seagate forum itself about people bricking their HDD after firmware update, and heck the number kept growing. I revisited the page that gave me the firmware, like 10 minutes after bricking my HDD, and here’s what I got:
Update:It’s alive… it’s alive !!!!!! Seagate just posted another firmware, I got all my data back
Since I do have a Seagate 7200.11 500GB 32MB, I decided to check if my HDD is among the batch affected. Well turns out I am, so I decided, what the heck, let’s just get this over with so that I don’t have to worry about it failing in the future. My HDD, ST3500320AS with firmware version SD15. The new firmware, SD1A, comes in a 1.5mb ISO file, which you’re suppose to burn to a CD, and boot from there. It boots into freedos, auto executed some batch file and you can just select your HDD model and it’ll proceed. Sounds pretty easy right? Everything seems smooth… NOOOOOOOooo !! BIOS detected primary HDD failure after reboot!!! I mean… WTF???!!!?? I started googling (more than 1 PC is good) and found on the seagate forum itself about people bricking their HDD after firmware update, and heck the number kept growing. I revisited the page that gave me the firmware, like 10 minutes after bricking my HDD, and here’s what I got:
Note: This file has been temporarily taken offline as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST for validation.Come on man, shouldn’t the validation be done BEFORE you release it to the public? So, there goes my gaming PC, and my save games, hopefully only for now coz there’s report of someone successfully reverting their firmware and got their data back. But for now, damn you Seagate, DAMN YOU!!
Update:It’s alive… it’s alive !!!!!! Seagate just posted another firmware, I got all my data back
21 Jan 2009 | 11:16 PM
Ha ha. Use Western D.