When you say for free, do you mean a returned new drive with your data from
your old drive on it? Did they send you a 1.5TB drive too?
Hope I can have the same luck. Is there an article referencing seagates 1.5
tb firmware issues so I can reference that?
Thanks,
jeff
No, it was my same drive. It wasnt from physical dmage. They had some ifssue
with the firmware on the 7200.11 series drives that in certain circumstances
once booted uup a certain amount of times or while booting in a vcertain
fashion, the drive would suddenly appear dead or missing. It couldnt even be
detected by the system bios and for al internsive purposes it was dead. They
had me send it to their 360 recovery service or whatever it was called and
they made the drive visible again using their special firmware setup and sent
the drive back. Unfortunately , the drive now shows in the SMART table as
having many spin up retries and so and SMART monitoring software rates the
drive as less than ideal. Its still safe to use, but it will not be my boot
drive now.
It was done for free for me.
"Seagate's explanation:
Description
An issue exists that may cause some Seagate hard drives to become inoperable
immediately after a power-on operation. Once this condition has occurred, the
drive cannot be restored to normal operation without intervention from
Seagate. Data on the drive will be unaffected and can be accessed once normal
drive operation has been restored. This is caused by a firmware issue coupled
with a specific manufacturing test process.
Root Cause
This condition was introduced by a firmware issue that sets the drive event
log to an invalid location causing the drive to become inaccessible.
The firmware issue is that the end boundary of the event log circular buffer
(320) was set incorrectly. During Event Log initialization, the boundary
condition that defines the end of the Event Log is off by one. During power
up, if the Event Log counter is at entry 320, or a multiple of (320 + x*256),
and if a particular data pattern (dependent on the type of tester used during
the drive manufacturing test process) had been present in the reserved-area
system tracks when the drive's reserved-area file system was created during
manufacturing, firmware will increment the Event Log pointer past the end of
the event log data structure. This error is detected and results in an "Assert
Failure", which causes the drive to hang as a failsafe measure. When the drive
enters failsafe further update s to the counter become impossible and the
condition will remain through subsequent power cycles. The problem only arises
if a power cycle initialization occurs when the Event Log is at 320 or some
multiple of 256 thereafter. Once a drive is in this state, there is no path to
resolve/recover existing failed drives without Seagate technical intervention.
For a drive to be susceptible to this issue, it must have both the firmware
that contains the issue and have been tested through the specific
manufacturing process.
Corrective Action
Seagate has implemented a containment action to ensure that all manufacturing
test processes write the same "benign" fill pattern. This change is a
permanent part of the test process. All drives with a date of manufacture
January 12, 2009 and later are not affected by this issue as they have been
through the corrected test process.
Recommendation
Seagate strongly recommends customers proactively update all affected drives
to the latest firmware. If you have experienced a problem, or have an affected
drive exhibiting this behavior, please contact your appropriate Seagate
representative. If you are unable to access your data due to this issue,
Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you
to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business."
http://www.expreview.
com/img/topic/seagate_firmware/1-16_KB11_Barracuda_Field_Update.pdf
Here are some links to what the issue was.
http://forums.seagate.
com/t5/Barracuda-XT-Barracuda-Barracuda/7200-11-falling-down-ST3500320AS-SD15-
and-others-no-detect-in/m-p/13553?view=by_date_ascending
http://www.tomshardware.
com/forum/248564-32-recognize-seagate-internal-hard-drive
Here is a do it yourself fix using a serial adapter
http://sites.google.com/site/seagatefix/