dadou

I did get my drive repaired for free by Seagate data recovery (confirmation on the bill) but still I am waiting to get it back (should arrive within days).

Hopefully not, it took them one working day between flashing and shipping back (today). But I do not know if they will make other cases a priority as they will not make any money with them ... Confirmation on my bill for my case: $0,00 USD Only one thing, they say on the bill that they keep the data 14 days after the disk si shipped. Be sure to make backup ASAP.

Hi, My drive died around Christmas only after 3 months of use. Feel free to add it to the list. 9QM6****:ST3500320AS:9BX154-303:SD15:09086:2008-08-28:KRAT8G:2008-09-25:2008-12-23:OEM:Dadou:France:(no detect in bios):winXP X86:Corsair 550W I registered to add my little contribution and maybe provide some useful information. As my drive had valuable information for me on it I desperately send it to i365, Seagate's data recovery company. At first, they sent me the normal quote of 1000€ for recovery which I complained about, claiming that I had no responsibility in the drive failure. A technician explained me that such failures could occur with: - shock of drive (never happened) - intensive usage of drive for several days (never happened too) Of course I was anything but convinced, as the drive was still spinning and there was no preventive sign of failure. On this point, nevertheless, I am not sure because I remember having continuously error messages from windows (could not read/write memory address #### ...) starting a few weeks before the failure. But it was not linked to memory as I have Vista on another identical drive and had no such issue. It only happened when I was checking file properties in explorer or trying to access certain files too. I did not pay more attention to that because I thought it was windows bug related (occurred after a specific windows update). I precise that i365 people have no link with manufacturing or technical support people from Seagate (do not blame them for this failure, they are quite nice and helpful). This was beginning of January. A few days after, I discovered this forum and many other ones where the same issue as mine was shared by people. I followed the complete Seagate story (fiasco?) on their forum, the serial checker #1 (which indicated my drive as affected), the firmware #1, #1bis, #2, everything. FYI, the current serial checker shows my already bricked drive as not affected ... So I informed the i365 guys that my issue could result from a firmware bug and may not need huge repair operation, only PCB flashing. They replied they would check with support team. Meanwhile, the revised SD1A was released and seemed to cure the bug (for now). I flashed my 2 other drives with it some days after to be sure that it would not brick them like rev#1. I received yesterday a phone call from i365, they told me that for my case, the recovery procedure would be different from normal one as the failure was due to bad manufacturing. They will fix the drive by reprogramming it, then send it back to me at no charge at all. They also keep a drive image for 1 month, so if I am not able to retrieve data from the drive, I still have a chance to get it. Their normal procedure is to send you the data back on an external drive, plus the original drive (they also keep an image for 1 month). The guy told me that the decision was made yesterday (01/27), as well as the procedure. Please do not ask me more details on the procedure, as I do not have any, I think I was a bit lucky to send my drive at the good time (not too soon) so I will not have to pay. It seems that their free offer to recover data for affected users is finally true, I do not know if other people can confirm my story. I precise that I have a very long experience with IT, so I exactly know what I am speaking about. I do not think Seagate's products are bad, i's only either their QA which is not strong enough, or their support team is definitely not qualified enough to deal with such failure. I hope it will help ...