MadOCer

BTW, found a solution to your firmware problem yet?

Yep. I know : http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...807&st=1776 But you cannot "counterattack" against voodoo with some more voodoo , from what we know the answer to whatever problem kang roy is having is "a suffusion of yellow": http://www.thateden.co.uk/dirk/ there is no way to know if (choose one) a simple DIY solution exists a non-simple DYI solution exists a "professional only" solution exists AND if: any of the above include opening the drive or not unless we know what the problem is. jaclaz I didn't say he shouldn't try to see if there was a simple solution. In no way did I mean that. But, this was just meant as a warning. There are no known big firmware BUGs, AFAIK, for the Western Digital drives. I might be wrong, I just don't know of any. I'm no professional in this field. As you said, without further details from his side, any help will be a guessing game.

The accuracy of your crystal ball is amazing! We don't even understand what the problem is and you already know that the drive has to be opened? Come on, kang roy has obviously some problems in expressing himself in English what he wants to say, (and he seems like attempting to start a data recovery business learning from MSFN as he posted in two days about three different make/model failing hard drives): http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...mp;#entry906885 http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=141594&hl= (besides the present thread) and some ununderstandable (at least for me) comments on data recovery related threads: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=141448&hl= http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=141687&hl= the only advice we can give right now is: @kang roy Please try to express better what you have to say, try using an online translator from your language to English and viceversa, if noone can actually understand the problem, you will never have an adequate advice or hopefully solution. Where are you from? What is your native language? jaclaz You misunderstood my posting I'm afraid! All I said was that there's no simple solution to ANY hdd problem out there and that it MIGHT be that a pure software solution can't fix the problem. That's what I meant. I posted that, because it seems that after the Seagate desaster, a lot of poeple tend to think that there is a simple solution to all hdd failures.

i'm sorry.... to overcome problems such as WDC is not detected in the BIOS, the sound head and Short PCBs, probably from among you have a solution,,, help please,,, with a tutorial,,, And who told you this was a common problem, fixable by some DIY solution that is easily followed? I can't remember reading much about WD drives showing these symptoms. So it might just be hardware problem of your particular drive, that is not easily fixed, but needs opening the drive and replaceing or repairing some of it's part inside.

Maybe there is away around the detection problem.

You read my post correctly. I was able to restore the functionality of the drive which i365 claimed was inaccessible. I was then able to backup all the data and flash the new firmware. Shame on i365. Very strange indeed! One would think that Seagate's own data recovery service would know how to recover the data on their own products, especially when only looking at the label (7200.11 SD15) should ring all alarm bells.

Does the drive sound "normal", when it is powered on, or does it exhibit any scratching or clicking noise or something like that? I mean does it spin up, like it used to when it was still working OK? yes it definately spins up. no strange noises or anything. just cant access the drive. appreciate if you're around london and able to fix it. I'm sorry, but I'd have quite a long way to London, from Bavaria, Germany . BUT, and that's the good news, your drive should be recoverable once the connection works. And that should definitely be possible to accomplish. Good luck! Just offer the poeple some money. Something like 10-20 pounds and I'm sure there will be someone to assist you with this.

If you intend to keep using the drive in the future, then there's no way around the firmware update. Or do you want to wait for the integrated self-bricking-feature to strike again, forcing you to repeat the steps to recover your data once again? But back up all your needed data before attempting the FW upgrade. You never know what happens, before it happens.

Just for fun so to speak: Anyone knows more about, or already used the following command (from the full comand list)? Level 4 u: Rev 0001.0000, Overlay, SetSkSpeed, u[Opts],[skSpeed] Looks like the not supported AAM function to me. But I could be wrong. Isn't accoustic management setting the seek speed in values from 0x80 (dec 128) to 0xFE (dec 254)? Would really like to try that one. But I think I won't do it on one of my good drives. And unfortunately I don't really know what the "Opts" stands for and what value to use for "SkSpeed". I did open up a defective 7200.11 today though (turned out to have a defective head on the upper platter that made the drive not spin up correctly and emmit a horrible whine while trying to spin up), which I could use for those kind of tests. Of course given it still somehow works more or less after I reassemble it.

Does the drive sound "normal", when it is powered on, or does it exhibit any scratching or clicking noise or something like that? I mean does it spin up, like it used to when it was still working OK?

BTW, I just unpacked the Seagate flash files for my ES.2 drive and from the looks of it the error message about "wrong model" etc. could be pretty simply circumvented. Didn't try it yet, because I don't need to ATM, but as I said, it looks pretty simple.

AFAIK, you can view a full command list, by typing "/C" on the first prompt and then "Q" afterwards. No guarantee though that it works. I remember having used that once some months ago. Try it, if you can risk a failure.

As I said, you can always try to contact Seagate. They should be able AND WILLING, to support you, considering it was THEIR fault that these drives drop like flies. They should be able to get you either the program for your specific firmware, or a flash-program that doesn't check for the part number AND FW revision. Maybe you'll have to be quite persistent, though, to make them help you.

You simply cannot use the standard flash tool on drives that have other firmware versions than the ones listed on the seagate page. If the drive is OEM, you have to contact the OEM for a flash upgrade tool. Or Seagate and ask them, if they are willing to help, given the circumstances.

I thought rather about shortcutting the predriver of the motor. And that's why I first will try to apply the cardboard in the moment described at the russian page. Ther is at a 80% chance that it makes the same job as the jumper ;-). I thought you already did that as this is the common method. Good luck! I fully understand that you don't want to risk you data, at least not any more than necessary.

I'm still sure that you can flash the firmware over serial via bootstrap. There you could flash what ever you want. But I don't think this applies for you disk becaus that would mean someone from Seagate service screwed it up... ;-) I doubt that some Seagate employee screwed it up. Perhaps they screwed up the flash software, in the way that it didn't stop the process, when detecting it was the wrong drive. Anyway, back to you problem: You just have to find the pic that shows exactly the same PCB layout as yours. And even if you can't find a match it is possible to locate the points on you own. You would just need some highres pics of the PCBs fronside (the one facing the drive's body). And you should have a digital multimeter, to check for direct connections. And BTW, it's not that dangerous! You are not shorting power supply pins (i.e. big sparks flying etc.), but low voltage and current signal pins.

Your disk could be locked in terminal, so this link might help: http://book-lab.ru/7200_11.html No guarantee though. It did help with the lock on my ES.2, though. BTW, a little update on my ST31000340NS (BTW, yes it is a OEM disk, but the N just stands for the ES.2 version instead of the A for the 7200.11 standard Barracuda): My ES.2 really got flashed with the wrong (i.e. 7200.11 SD35) firmware. How Do I know, you ask? Well, easy enough: As I already mentioned the drive is recognized on boot up and shown in BIOS as 0MB. Well, I had a more precise look today and sure enough it said "ST31000340AS" in BIOS and boot up screen. Now one could guess that someone just screwed on the PCB of a 7200.11 SD35 firmware based drive. You ask why I'm quite sure this is not the case? Using the CTRL+L and CTRL+A commands when only having the PCB connected, I got to see the drives serial number (S/N), which matches the printed S/N on the casing. So this PCB does indeed belong to this HDD. The question remains however, how someone did actually manage to flash a SD35 7200.11 firmware onto a ES.2 drive. And the even more important question: How do I get the drive as far as being able to flash back a correct ES.2 firmware. Really strange case.

I just realized something simple, yet perhaps quite important. The ES.2 1TB drive that I have here is named ST31000340NS, but there is a very similarly named 1TB Barracuda 7200.11 drive, known as ST31000340AS. Could be that someone accidentaly flashed his ES.2 drive with the SD35 firmware for the Barracuda 7200.11. Anyway, in the meantime I thought about it some more and the scenario that someone swapped the PCB becomes more and more unrealistic. So the mistake while trying to flash the drive seems more and more likely.

Are you absolutely sure that you have set up the RS232 connection just like it should be (38400 bps etc)? What you get looks like wrong communication setup.

Hi guys, just for the fun of it (after having revived 4 out of 5 bad Cudas), I bought a 1TB Barracuda ES.2 to tinker with. Got the drive yesterday and it's a bit strange to say the least. The drive seems to have the BSY bug for sure, as the HDD LED is constantly lit when the drive is connected on boot up. The drive even is detected by BIOS sometimes, as having 0MB, as usual with this problem. But now it gets a bit strange: The drive spins up, or let's say it tries to and you can hear a good amount of clicking going on. That clicking seems to be caused by the drive moving the heads around quickly. It doesn't sound like grinding on the platter or something. Just like randomly moving the heads without direction. Then it spins down after about 5-10 seconds. I then connected the drive to terminal using my well working FT2232 USB adapter cable and found the drive to be locked in terminal. Shorted the "read-channels", as seen in some guides, and it unlocked the terminal for sure. Then I tried to spin down the drive, which worked fine. But on trying to spin up, it got me the well known "ERROR: 1009 DETSEC...". Hmm... drive appears to be dead. But then I thought let's see what the drive reports using the "Ctrl+A" and "Ctrl+L" key-combinations for some info. And interestingly enough, it said to have FW-Version "SD35" flashed. Yes, "SD35". Now how can that be? I thought SD35 was exclusive to normal Barracuda 7200.11 drives and the ES.2 Cudas used SN0x (x for 1 through 6 AFAIK) numbering scheme. Or am I missing something? My first guess is that some dumb*** mounted a 7200.11's PCB to that ES.2 drive. I don't know why, but it would explain the Firmware version. And it would explain the random head movement and failure to spin up correctly. How should it with the wrong info stored in flash. The question now is: Is there a way to tell if this particular PCB belongs to that particular drive? And could some people with ES.2 drives perhaps check the output of the "Ctrl+A" and Ctrl+L" key-combinations in terminal? That would be interesting. I mean I don't need that drive or its data back. I bought it purely for the fun of tinkering and getting it to work again would just be a plus, but certainly is not necessary. I'm just curious as to what happened to that thing. Thanks in advance! Greets from Bavaria MadOCer

Hi guys, long time no see. I have something strange to report. Some time ago I had tried to resurrect my ST31000333AS SD15, but unfortunately wasn't successful. I gave up on the drive, stored it in the closet and pretty much forgot about it. Today I decided to give it another try and to my surprise it now is detected in BIOS again, but pretends to have FW, version "ZZ7L", whích is 100% wrong. That means essentially I could flash the drive, but due to the firmware check at the beginning of the flash procedure, it just stops there with an error stating "NO MATCH" although it is definitely the right drive. It now is detected by BIOS as ST31000333AS, which is correct, but as having a capacity of 0MB. And I can't get the command to fix this problem (m0,2,2,,,,,22) to work. It just hangs in hyperterminal. Perhaps this has something to do with reporting the wrong firmware in some way. Anyway, I now contacted Seagate. Who knows, maybe they are actually willing to help. Update: SUCCESS!!! I got my 1TB drive back. After it was recognized by BIOS now I could finally issue the m0,2,2,,,,,22 command on another machine and it actually worked. It took ages (~35 minutes!) to finish, but it worked. Flashed the firmware right away and everything seems OK.

If the drive has no short circuit on the power connector than the drive itself either works or has other defetcs. That is all I can tell you from what you stated above.

Good job If anything goes wrong later on, do tell us as I have just installed a 500GB 7200.11 drive with SD1A firmware into an external enclosure so I am hoping it will live for longer than a few days like it did with the SD15 firmware. If I know of others that have SD1A drives dying then I will know to be careful with what I put on it. Just as a side note: I don't think that using any Seagate 7200.11 Barracuda drive in an (most likely not active cooled) external hard drive enclosure is a particularly good idea. Just last week I used one of my Barracudas externally to back up a good amount of data and it got VERY hot in its case while copying data for a longer period of time. I highly doubt that this is good for the drive. However I have to say that my room temp was quite hot that day. About 27-28°C. Still I don't think that the drive would have stayed really considerably cooler, if the room-temp had been lower. So, I would be careful with these drives when using them externally. Personally I wouldn't advise anyone to use them without sufficient cooling, unless all the drive(-s) do(-es) is idle 99% of the time.

Thx for the hint! I remember to have read that page more than once, but I just didn't bookmark it and so I retried the well known method over and over again. Wil try this in the next days. Drive was lying around the last week. Got another 500GB drive in the meantime which worked like a charm after a firmware upgrade and fixing some bad sectors in Seatools DOS edition. Will try that one again, using the large test, too, just to make 100% sure. Want to use it in Raid1 in the future, so it better be working. My track record so far: 3x 500GB 8MB Cache Moose drives (2 restored), 1x 500GB 16MB Cache Moose drive (restored), 1x 1TB Brinks drive (still unusable). So I got 3 working drives for the price of 2. Not bad for a simple student who doesn't have money to waste.

How about using google next time? Typed in "Seagate firmware" and ~10 seconds later I had the official Seagate page for the 7200.11 firmware updates. http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...&NewLang=en