icefloe01

BlouBul= B)

Wow. Just, wow. Thank you for thoroughly reading the thread and staying completely on top of the issue and realizing that big, bad Seagate has truly gotten a huge, evil deed over on us. Fight "The Power"! Down with "The Man"!! Curse them for doing this to us and then offering to repair the drives for free and offer free data recovery!! That's just totally unacceptable because everything they produce should be 100% perfect! No flaws ever allowed!! Nevermind the fact that if we have irreplaceable data we should have multiple, redundant backups (some offsite), and if we don't that's Seagate's fault as well!! D*** you Seagate!! D*** you to H***!!! </sarcasm>

This page: http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...=en&Hilite= Specifically this file: http://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support...D-8-16-32MB.ISO

That firmware will NOT work for that drive, it is for the ST31000333AS drive. The differences between them are: the data density on the platters, the number of platters, and the numbers of heads. The ST31000333AS drives has 3 disks (platters) with ~333GB per disk (~166.666666GB per side) and 6 heads (one for each side of platter) and the ST31000340AS has 4 disks (250GB per disk, 125GB per side) and 8 heads. If you still have SD15 firmware, you should upgrade to SD1A. SD1A ISO file.

If the firmware is SD15 and you have some technical ability, you will be able to fix the drive after reading through this thread. If you don't feel safe in performing the fixes outlined here, then Seagate does offer free data recovery and firmware upgrade for this drive model.

Does the harddrive spin up when you power on the system? If it does, yet the BIOS does not find it, and you do NOT hear any constant click-click-click noise (it would be quite noticeable) then you most likely have the "BSY" problem and would need to reset the drive through it's serial port. That dlethe guy cannot make the ASSumption you have a hardware failure as he did not bother to ask you any specifics about what is happening in your situation.

jaclaz is teh kewlerest!

320

The new firmware has been pulled AGAIN! Actually no, at least MooseDT-SD1A-3D4D-16-32MB.ISO are the very same (I compared). Gradius Well that's just strange as hell. I went three different paths to arrive at the link above and the page from the 19th was up that said it was in validation. I saw it right before I posted. Now the page is back to normal with the new firmware again. Weird...

The new firmware has been pulled AGAIN!

The new firmware is out!! http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...sp?DocId=207951

Hi, That won't represent any problem. Serial FLASH can support 100,000 writes/erases (yes 100k). We're very very safe here. Gradius The number of re-writes isn't what concerns me. They pulled the firmware for "validation" so I'm wondering if I should re-download and re-flash my drive after they validate the firmware even though the SD1A update on Monday worked for me...

So when the new SD1A comes out, should I re-flash to it again? I flashed three drives (individually of course or they would not be working...) with the second release of it on Monday evening and all three drives work fine. But should I be concerned since they pulled it? My drives are 1TB.

Actually, they removed the firmware from site again. Gradius Well crapola (since I can't "say" the other...). Since it worked for me, do you think all will be okay, or should I re-flash when ver.3 is released?

Updated to SD1A last night after they silently fixed the first ISO with the incorrect flash program. So today my drives are (potentially) safe!! Happy birthday to me!! WOO HOO!!

Affected drives were being reported as NOT affected because people were not putting in all capital letters. Seagate probably took the tool offline to rewrite it so it would not matter if the letters were capital or not. I'll bet it will be back up before too long. It was just a careless programming error I'd bet.

The good thing is, you could email them for free. One person posted here saying that these cases are granted priority... Contact Seagate via email

The only thing I'm a bit nervous about with whatever they release to update our drives is that it will most likely require a bootdisk to be made so the program can access the drive from a pseudo-DOS environment. That means a reboot. And we know what potentially happens on reboot. I have three 1TB drives that have not failed yet. I feel this most likely due to the fact that I keep my computer on 24/7. The only times I have ever rebooted were either from BSOD's (freakin' X-Fi Xtreme Gamer in Vista 64) or Windows Updates. So on each successive reboot it will take to repair the drives (I'm sure we'll have to do them one at a time), I'm that much closer to losing one or all of them. I wonder if this failure has something to do with these "lists" I have read about that the drive writes to either the disk or the EEPROM. I don't know enough about this end of the technology, so I could be way off base, but maybe there is supposed to be some component of these lists that is supposed to be flushed at either shutdown or power on. If that's the case and they're not always getting cleared properly, maybe that's what is causing the firmware to attempt to write data where it's not supposed to and the drive locks up in "BSY" mode to protect itself. Although that would not explain the few people that have reported it happening while their computer was still running... I don't know, I'm just throwing out some speculation.

How & where can we check the EEPROM information you are asking for? Please be a little more descriptive. I believe you have to pull the board off the drive and look at the chips on the other side...

And the Lawyers get hungry... http://www.kbklawfirm.com/seagate/?gclid=C...CFQquGgodTUfunQ

There's a chance I'll be safe then since my mobo is a Striker Extreme. Nvidia MCP55 chipset. I don't think it has a true NCQ implementation...

Looks like for the past week, poolcarpet is the main poster on thye msfn forums... http://boardreader.com/sp/MSFN_Forums_14173.html

I wouldn't do that. Those updates were to address a different problem and I believe are centered around a different type of platter also (not 100% positive though). That would be great, except none of the RAR password recovery tools are multi-threaded, so my quad core is working at 1/4 possible load. At this rate the "english with smart mutations" is gonna take about 20hrs... If I remember correctly, I needed to crack a password last year sometime. I divided the dictionary by four and started four instances of the program so each could have one core of the processor...

...this is all assuming the password is actually a WORD. A true brute force would take a few decades. Yeah, I doubt it's a word, especially one using English characters. I'll bet it's a Chinese character set which would take eons since they have well over 3000 characters in traditional. It would definitely be killer if someone could find a GPU powered solution. I've got two 8800GTX's in SLi (I miss 3DFX).

WOW!! I am completely impressed! All of you are completely awesome!!! So unlike all those d**kheads over on the HDD Guru forums. The sharing of information like what's happening in this forum is eactly the reason the interweb (LOL) exists. I wish I possessed the knowledge and skills of the software end like some of you do, however I don't have the time to dedicate to full time learning to obtain it (wife + two kids + 60 hour a week full time job). I may not have drive failure YET, but I'm waiting for it to happen. And a big THANK YOU to all who are working towards, and FINDING, a solution so I'll know either what to do to fix it, or who to send it to for a reasonable amount of money to get it fixed. I'm an electronic technician, so I have no problem grabbing a chip, connectors, resistors, and transistors for breadboarding a serial interface and cable. I just don't have extensive knowledge of the serial commands. I do however have guys here at work that can code in C++ and JAVA. So if/when pichi figures out the commands to send through hyperterminal, there might be a possibility I can get one of these guys to write a simple program to take care of everything. I can't guarantee that though. But it's starting to look like there is light at the end of the tunnel now!! Once again, THANK YOU to all that made positive contributions to data gathering and finding a solution!!! You completely ROCK!!! I'm running a 1-7 digit numerical brute force, and an English dictionary brute force with smart mutations in ARCHPR right now. If it don't find anything with the standard wordlist, I'm gonna try some of the ones here: http://www.theargon.com/achilles/wordlists/ keep us updated. Hey, perhaps this could be a distributed thing if we coordinate on the program for the attack. I can pause BOINC and install this program and attack it too. We can coordinate the break points of the dictionary attacks and post them here in case anyone else wants to help. It could then be updated as to whether that particular section is taken, reserved, or completed. I'm running a QX6700 at stock speed with Vista Ultimate 64. I used to have my system overclocked to until I started getting BSOD's. Just a few days I ago figured out it was my soundcard causing "Uncorrectable Hardware Errors" and removed it. Now I just need to start overclocking again... What do you think of the distributed attack idea?