mikesw

And don't forget that medical offices and the military uses Hard disks to to name a few. Sending the drive back for an RMA is not realistic. Small doctors offices don't always back up YOUR medical records. Sorry we lost your medical records wouldn't be acceptable. The military does use PCs in a war zone although they are ruggedized for abuse and the environment they are in. However, no contractor, sysadmin, or user can design a ruggedized system against the failure rates seagate had in this firmware bug. Commanding officer: give me the coordinates of the enemy on the map. I can't the computer won't recognize the disk drive that was working before lunch!!!! I'd have to do backups every minute and even then there is no guarantee, and I'd also have to have duplicate computer equipment to move the backup to, just in case. The officer, I need it now! Sorry it'll take a few hours to restore. So Seagate and hardware/software manufacturers, how many lives were lost because of your defective products?

Yep! he's the one that wrote the article on storagesecrets.com David A. Lethe, of SANtools, Inc. Perhaps, one should ask what the software/firmware bug count is per product you have written. I hate buggy software and firmware and yes I've written software and firmware too. Seagate has admitted they've known about this problem since the early 1990's. It's very unacceptable to release and keep releasing products with a known problem. Yes, it was explained by seagate tech support that it was a race condition in firmware. If you advocate that a few bugs are ok and is part of business, please detail all commercial software and hardware products you and your company perform services for so I and the rest of us can avoid your products. Seagate and any other manufacturer that delivers a known faulty product should be liable for negligence. It's not to hard to sue to get the source code and have an outside person analyze the bugs that the vendors hide. See the case on the breath analyzer and voting machines that the courts now have required them to release regardless of trade secret or proprietary code. Beaware that in some countries, US law doesn't apply and if faulty products are sold there I'm sure they can prevent the further sale of these products. Hope, the companies bottom line survives. Numerous manufacturers hope the warranty expires before a hardware or software bug shows itself. This is attitude is unacceptable. Look at the lemon law for automobiles. There should be one for software and hardware manufacturers. RMA'ng the drive is a cop-out. And no, seagate only replaces the drive, they don't fix it and send you back your original drive. If the hard drives were designed properly, then data recovery companies such as yours wouldn't be needed. This will be case once solid state devices takeover disk drive manufactures and the amount of hardware and firmware is less thus reducing the chance of failure. Unless you personally wrote the firmware for these seagate drives, you have no leg to stand on except assumed speculation. BTW, if your companies products had as much problems as seagate, what is your companies policy to rectify the situation. If it is to ignore the problem, then you will have issues. I and just about everyone else will not have a problem of informing the technical publishing companies about your products and services. In the end, the last person to be damaged will be you and your company. Please provide known information on your faulty products so that I may start contacting the tech websites about it right away and let everyone else know !!!!

Question, after you swap the PCB boards, and then you boot up, does the BIOS detect the HDD? Hello, I'm very happy now because I figured this out. :) :) When you swap the boards the "old" board should boot the new drive with 0Mb. Since the disk is not made for that PCB. Will be normally detected on BIOS. After this fireup firmware update. You'll some errors like Cylinder 0, assuming 63! Something like this. But just ignore and flash the drive. After the power cycle reswap PCB's and use the old drive. It should be fixed from BSY and from LBA=0! See details of what I've done in the Solution Thread. []'s I'm wondering if one can get away with not even attaching the PCB to the disk of the 2nd drive. The reason being is that when they make these at the factory, they probably just attach the PCB to a test machine which flashes the PCB and runs electrical tests on it. This would be easier to make these in mass and then ship a box of these to another site that attaches the PCBs to the actual disk that some other factory site made in mass. Then both are run through another test machine to make sure the PCB and drive heads and platters work together. Thus, for those with the PCB having LBA=0 and BSY, try just removing the PCB from the drive, attach the PCB to the power and IDE/SATA cable, and then reflash with the new firmware. It'd be interesting to see if this works. Maybe the BIOS doesn't need to detect them. This will also eliminate the possible damaging of the disk heads and platter of the drive that is incompatible since there isn't one. The most that will happen is there is no spinup, 0 heads, 0MB/GB, 0 cylinders etc or this method won't work. The only thing that will happen is that you are SOL! The other possiblilty to bypass the BIOS is to attach just the PCB to an external SATA or IDE to USB adaptor cable (see sabrent adaptors or equiv) and power cable ,then plug in the USB and flash thru the USB port. I'm not sure if one can flash thru the USB even if updating working drives, but without any knowledge about it working or not, the only way to attain knowledge is to experiment.....and hopefully the BIOS is too stupid.

I haven't upgraded mine yet. I was wondering if one uses the USB drive to bootup and reflash the drive, can I put the st31000333AS on a SATA to USB adaptor and flash thru the USB port, or must I attach the drive directly to the motherboard SATA port and then flash? I'd prefer to flash it using the USB ports to bootup in and flash thru the second USB port where the HDD is attached. The reason is for convenience and I have a few of these drives which makes things simpler. As for your problem, I presume enclosure is external USB drive boxes vs. eSATA ones. Did you take your drive out of the enclosure and flash it or flash it thru the USB drive port to the enclosure. If the second one is the case, perhaps taking the drive out of the enclosure and re-flashing it by attaching it to the motherboard may make it work when you stick it back in the enclsoure.

Stated very clearly and openly on the update page... * Note: If your drive has CC or LC firmware, your drive is not affected and no further action is required. Attempting to flash the firmware of a drive with CC or LC firmware will result in rendering your drive inoperable. Yes it does; however, people want to have the latest and greatest firmware no matter what. The reason is because what ever is the newest version must fix something: a bug, make it faster, make it more reliable etc. I'd like to get newer firmware versions to for my non-SATA seagate, maxtor, western digital drives regardless if they are 3.5 or 2.5 drives. I update my dvd/cd rw drives as soon as they provide a newer firmware fix under the assumption it must of fixed something - likewise for the HDD drives too. Note: the newest firmware is S1B and the various xDxH means the number of disks and the number of heads in the HDD. Since the filename doesn't mention cache size. One can say either the firmware is independent of it or they are all the same cache size. for the model numbers listed. The easiest way is to find a tool that can dump the firmware in the drive and save it to a file from ones current drive. One could also write the new firmware to the drive, read it back and do a comparison of what got written or do a checksum, md5 hash too.

Try this free hard disk tester program for windows. http://www.hddscan.com For those in Russia for disk recovery http://rlab.ru Other software thats supposed to allow one to reflash a drive that isn't recognized is PC-3000 again made by http://www.acelabs.ru in russia or http://www.acelaboratory.com or http://www.deepspar.com and http://www.pc3000.com See this tool they make...for firmware fixing http://www.deepspar.com/products-pc-3000-drive.html

Naah! you go first! It looks like based on the filename its the same firmware slightly modified based on whether your drive has 2 disks "2D". Regardless if it is 8MB, 16MB, 32MB caches. The other is for 3 or 4 disks "3D" , "4D". Regardless if it is 16MB or 32MB caches

Try this (at terminal): Press CTRL+Z then press CTRL+^A (to Display Firmware Revision) F3 T>/L F3 L>I (to Display Log File Info) F3 L>D (to Display Log File) Gradius Can you post your log file so we can see what it looks like?

Seagate stated that the Diamond Max 21 line also needs a fix too. However, they don't state if it is the SATA or ATA/IDE/PATA line or both. I bought the following MAXTOR 500 Gb Diamond Max 21 line about two years ago in a retail kit as STM305004N1AAA-RK kit: L01Y500 7200.1 . PN: 9DP0A6-591 The kit actually contained this drive model STM3500630A PN: 9DP046-326 I also bought two Seagate 750GB retail drives ST3750640A-RK PN 98J048-305 and same model but PN 9BJ748-550 In all three drives above, the Firmware is 3.AAE regardless if it is Maxtor or Seagate. This probably means although my Maxtor is Diamond Max 21 that the Seagate 750 having the same firmware version can be thought of really as a Maxtor Diamond Max 21 too although seagates website doesn't mention these drives sizes i.e. 500 gb. Conclusion: I'll probably need a firmware fix for the current line of problems in seagate drives. Does anybody out there know what the latest firmware version is for these? I searched google and people seemed to have problems with 3.AAK. This was supposed to fix speed problems, but made things worse.....

I'd think that HDD Tune can't read this info from the disk drive directly. I think what it does is read the DRive model number and lookup in a local database the other drive charactertistics and display them to the user. Thus HDD Tune needs to have it's database updated with the newer drive info by the developers of HDD Tune. This includes info such as ATA/ATAPI-????? and the UDMA info. So in the case of my ST31000333AS having 32mb of cache, HDD tune would modify the DBMS to say lookup the drive model and display that 32mb info to the user.

The slashdot seagate guy said that when the internal drive log exceeds 320 entries and one powers down and then up, that the drive errors out on init and won't boot properly - to the point that it won't even report it's information to the BIOS. Thus, is one able to dump the contents of this log using the Rs232 port or SATA i.e. smartdrive to see what the log entries are and how many there are in it? I'd like to see if I'm close to the 320 limit. The guy said "IT is a rare condition". Hmmm, one would think that any thing no matter how rare will happen "Murphys Law". Thus, the firmware should have been designed to handle any error condition and not just crash due to log (buffer) overflow. This is just bad engineering IMHO and RMA'g the drive is not the solution either. That's just a copout. What a "loser" would do! The conditions have to be just right - you have to reboot just after the drive writes the 320th log file to the firmware space of the drive. this is a log file that's written only occasionally, usually when there are bad sectors, missed writes, etc... might happen every few days on a computer in a non-RAID home use situation.. and if that log file is written even one time after the magic #320, it rolls over the oldest file kept on the drive and there's no issue. It'll only stop responding IF the drive is powered up with log file #320 being the latest one written... a perfect storm situation. IF this is the case, then seagate is trying to put in place a procedure where you can simply ship them the drive, they hook it up to a serial controller, and re-flashed with the fixed firmware. That's all it takes to restore the drive to operation! As for buying new drives, that's up to you. None of the CC firmware drives were affected - only the SD firmware drives.If you were to have flashed the drives with the 'bad' firmware - it would disable any read/write functions to the drive, but the drive would still be accessible in BIOS and a very good chance that flashing it back to a previous SD firmware (or up to the yet to be released proven firmware) would make it all better. As far as I know, if your drive has the CC1G, CC1H, CC1J or any of the CC firmwares really, it is completely unaffected by this issue. However, it may need an update if you experience 'stuttering' (the drive pausing for more then a few seconds during data transfer). The CC1H and CC1J firmwares are *fine* and will absolutely not brick your drive. The update script checks two things.. to make sure it's a BRINKS or a MOOSE drive, and to check the model number. If you get the firmware from the torrents (it's out there) and tear it apart with uniextract, you can see the batch file and what it checks for. It's a program that was built back in the 90's and used ever since! You remove those 2 checks, and it'll happily flash that IBM or Western Digital drive with the seagate firmware as well. The 1.5Tb drives both stutter and are at risk of bricking due to the journal issue. The Stuttering issue is fairly recent and mostly runs in the 1.5tb drives - but the journal issue is older and exists across many 7200.11 drives. ES2 drives and Diamondmax drives. SD1A fixes both of these problems in the 1.5Tb drives. My suggestion to Seagate or any hardware manufacturer is to do what Intel does. Since most people have MSOFT Windows installed, intel provided microcode updates to MSOFT. MSoft then provides these microcode updates as product quality/reliability enhancements which are downloaded (I assume automatically) and then (perhaps during a bootup) reflashes the microcode in the Intel processor up doing a check for which Intel processor you have. Probably based on the intels S-SPEC number that identifies the chip family, step increment and so on before flashing it. Thus, the hardware manufacturers need to work with Microsoft to do the same thing for their hardware, whether that be ethernet board flashing, hard disk flashing, BIOS, video and graphics, sound etc. This will eliminate people having to call the vendor support to beg/plead to get these and spend alot of time searching the internet for these patches and it will eliminate the user creating problems via bad firmware flashing too! As far as "BRINKS" "MOOSE" "GALAXY" etc.. are concerned, they are pretty much the internal development names of the drive family. There can be overlap, but most "BRINKS" drives are 7200.11, I believe, while "MOOSE" drives are almost all 7200.10, and "GALAXY" drives are 7200.9. Generally, those names don't make it out into public, but if you were to tear into the SD1A firmware, you'll notice that it looks for the "BRINKS" drive before it flashes the firmware to the drive. There can be different internal names for different revisions of the drive itself, but generaly they stick to one revision per family - a new internal name would only be used for a MAJOR revision on the drive. SMART characteristics can vary from part number to part number - or even sometimes drive-to-drive; so what is 'out of tolerances' for one part number could be just fine for a different p/n (even though they are the same model number). The BIOS bootup and LBA 0 GB explaination The known issue manifests itself where the drive spins up fine but either reports no data to the drive controller (or BIOS if applicable) or shows up with zero capacity Here's a person who worked in Disk drives explains ROMWARE vs. DISKWARE and how flashing the HDD really works. I'm not sure if this is for all HDD manufacturers though. The manufacturer can generally reload the firmware from scratch through a serial or diag port. After all that's what they do in manufacturing. When I worked with disk drives, we had ROMware, firmware (in flash) and Diskware. The ROM is mask programmed and has only boot code that can program the flash ROM, the flash ROM can be reloaded via the disk interface or a serial port (and can't do much more than load a track from disk), and the disk contains the actual code. Then we got rid of the flash ROM and things became a little more exciting because the code in ROM had to be able to read and write a few sectors reliably - for the entire lifetime of the product [line], including cost reductions. Seagates Refurb Process Thing is, I know Seagate really does try to push for high manufacturing standards (for example, did you know that every last Refurb drive *must* go through the full new-drive qualification before it's sent out? - something only a percentage of actual new drives have to go through because it's time consuming). Here's seagate techsupport explaining what happens to drives that are sent back for refurb/reflash. If you have confidential data on the drive, you have two options: a) if you send it in for a reflash, there will be a tech who flashes the drive using a serial interface, and then verifies good read/writes to the data. But he's likely unbricking a hundred drives a week, and doesn't care about what's on the drive unless he happens to maybe notice a folder when he does he read/write test labled "OMG HUGE AMOUNT OF CHILD PORNOGRAPHY". I can't even say that a person will even be doing the R/W test - but there is that chance. or b) RMA your drive. The first thing that happens once the drive passes a visual inspection (verifying that the warranty is still valid and the drive hasn't been user-damaged physically) is the drive is thrown on a text machine. if the drive passes the physical tests, then it's firmware is flashed and the diag machine goes through a 7 pass zero-random-zero-random cycle that destroys any and all data on the drive. This not only ensures data wipe, but also helps diagnose any read/write errors on the drive. If you RMA the drive, it's not even hooked up to a human-accessable 'computer' (just diag equipment) until the next customer who received the drive as a refurb, puts it in their computer - at which point it should be so blank, not even the government could recover data from it using the most advanced tech that we know about.

Why not get two cheap 500 gig laptop drives for the USB port and backup to that? Then you don't need 200 DVDs or blurays at 25gigs each

What about any of the seagate laptop drives that are either SATA or IDE? Do they have firmware problems and if so will they be fixed too? I'll have to dig into the computer and check out an old 3.5 Seagate IDE/PATA 750GIG 7200.10 drive I bougft about 1.5 years ago since I'm pretty sure it also had SD15 on it to when I bought two of them from staples.com The seagate knowledge base doesn't seem to specify if it is SATA, IDE, PATA interface types or all of them. any IDE failed drives out there? Techreport also contacted seagate and they got a response saying they will do free data recovery and a firmware fix. http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16246 Per the above article Support is also available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1 800 732-4283) Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions. There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But 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. For a list of international telephone numbers to Seagate Support and alternative methods of contact, please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/ *There is no safety issue with these products. Here's one posters comment on how Seagate will do free recovery very cheaply. It makes sense... For those with linux. Here's the command to get the drive firmware and info hdparm -I /dev/sda|b|c What does the seagate CEO think? Read all about it. http://money.cnn.com/2006/11/30/magazines/...eagate.fortune/ Another poster said and I quote! Time to call the magazines again to get the ball rolling on this...

and techreport http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16232 They say they have phone call in to them to get the scoop on the problem!!! Alot of websites like tomshardware and such are computer hardware review sites which get alot of free hardware to test out and compare against other competitiors. So I think seagate wouldn't want to p*** them off! Since their opinion influences alot what the higher end computer geeks buy. I just posted to slashdot.org another tech website. We'll see if they post the story. Heres my seagate press release! Here's a story thats been brewing for awhile and although seagate and their tech support is ignoring the problem by deleting,locking seagate forum accounts etc to hide the problem it has now become a worldwide problem with seagate 7200.11 HDD failing one day when the BIOS doesn't recognize the drive. People have narrowed the problem down to a BSY flag and when they try to correct it by an RS232 port to the HDD, they clear it but get LBA 0GB then. It doesn't matter if in Raid, or non-raid either. Failure rates from 20-80%. SalvationData.com in China provide data recover tool that is moderately expensive which fixes this problem. People don't want to RMA their drive since if they do, others can look at their data Discussion and tech websites getting the latest story/gossip techsite Also people found a knowledge base article -- which seagate quickly deleted -- that lists the drives with the problem. See archive image of their webpage image The bugs seems to be with NCQ and flush so BSD Unix patches NCQ out patch And the lawyers are getting in the act The law which probably caused this ceo quits and employee layoff Since seagate ignored the problem and locked their accounts, people posted to techwebsites and also to wikipedia to get the word out. See the 7200.11 section and the footnotes to the discussion sites wikipedia. Now seagate issues shall live forever in posterity!! Have we gotten Seagates attention yet!!! Isn't the web great....?

I couldn't find one on the net for sale. For those places that seemed to sell it, the site said they didn't have any. One site that had the M8965 part which was suppposed to be the 570 turned out to be some type of ancient Compaq logic or memory card which I RMA'd back. So there are multiple vendors using the M8965 PN for various part numbers. The site I bought this from sold DELL, HP and Compaq, and didn't have a textual explanation as to what it was, so I assumed it was the one to get - it was not. I'm expecting a 560J next week. Although the BIOS fixes said nothing was updated for the No execute BIT (like the P4 series with J), there is a place in the BIOS which currently lists the ability to turn on and off the no execute bit - so I think it should work. Well see.... If I come across a 570, I try it out.....

Instead of the IOMEGA rev which is limited in capacity, why not try the 2.5 inch laptop drives? They are cheap. a WD 250 Gig BEVE is only $79.99 at newegg.com or equiv where you are at. Since this is IDE (you could buy SATA's which are 500 gig too, but you may want to use a different interface type to reduce the risk of laptop drives having the same problem as 3.5 inch ones if they have the same interfae type). I have the 250 gig WD BEVE IDE drive as backup and use the Sabrent USB to IDE/SATA adaptor. The adaptor has an external power adaptor, but since I'm using 2.5 inch, I can run it off the USB cable for power and read/write the drive with the USB to IDE adaptor. The same would apply to a 2.5 inch SATA laptop drive in using the USB as the power I believe but I don't have SATA laptop drives at the moment. See http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16812156017 or maybe this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...82E16812816014R Note: I did have to buy a SATA to molex power cable (is cheap) since the one that came with the IDE/SATA adaptor already had damaged pins in the connector which kept coming out. After doing this, the Sabrent adaptor device works great. Other convertors are IDE to or from SATA: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16812232004 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822998001 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16822998008

Are there any tools to dump the firmware from either IDE or SATA HDDs? Since we are doing backups of our data, might as well backup our HDD firmware just in case it is getting corrupted. Moreover, if people have a particular HDD model and one wants the newest firmware version and seagate plays dump (saying your is the latest), one can get it and be up to date.

I'm curious as to what will happen if you put a jumper on the drive to make it work at SATA I speeds of 150 mb/s? After jumpering, will it work in the USb enclosure and in the computer case?

I bought 2 1TB 7200.11 ST31000333AS drives in the beginning of December 2008. I installed one of them after Jan 1,2008 and have multiple partitions on it which only has 13gigs so far stored on it. It isn't used for OS booting purposes. I haven't gotten around to moving the Win xp sp3 OS from a 40gig seagate from around 2004 to this new drive yet. The computer is a gx280 Dell with A08 BIOS version. The drive isn't set to go into hibernate mode. It is booted up once a day and used for about an hour or two per day thus not 24/7 operation and no RAID cards. The jumper on the drive was removed to let the BIOS and the 915G chipset auto-detect the speed which will go to 150 MB/s since the chipset can't go faster. The country of manufacture/origin is Thailand, firmware SD15, ST31000333AS SATA. Serial 9TE0.... So far no problems, but will keep an eye out. Others on the net have SD35 for this drive model. No mention of SD2x where x is a number for these versions. Thus, hard to determine how many different versions were released to the world between what I have and what others have. Questions: a). What is the affect of the bios clock and any internal timer/clock that the seagate drive has which may be affected by the leap second that was added at the beginning of the year? MSoft had problems with their Zune's which were dying all around the world. MSofts fix was to wait a little bit and the problem would go away and thus wouldn't provide a firmware fix for this special case. Hmm, do the Zunes use laptop Seagate drives? Which ones? Perhaps couldn't fix it since it was seagate related. Do the drive internals have any clocks/timers in hardware or firmware that may cause the problem? What about the NCQ protocol or SATA Standard having any frame times being sent back and forth that work with the firmware that could cause lockup/time syncing issues? Can someone set their BIOS clock before they bought the drive and bootup to see if the BIOS detects the drive now? b ). Is everyone using their drives as one partition (basic, logical, dynamic, raw) and maxing them out or do they have multiple partitions. c). Is it possible to turn off drive write caching and also NCQ'ng capability to see if the problem goes away? I had to turnoff write caching for ZIP drives to make an Acronis software bug go away (as an example). d). Here's a link to a person who's company bought 150 seagate drives. Within 4 months 37 died and within 6 months they had an overall total of 51 new drives fail and 4 recertified drives fail. See poster 9 at this weblink http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread....21#post15419621

Here's weblink to speedfan to monitor HDD temps etc. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php

Here's a post I found on another web forum on the net. http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=15488709 A poster there used the software "speedfan v4.37" to monitor smart, fan speeds and temperature. It might be useful software as monitoring software.

May I suggest www.theregister.co.uk as a good place to start!!!! Once it's stared the info will make its rounds amongst the tech websites. Don't forget to mention the poor Seagate website support forum and to mention names too!!!!

This site is ridiculous, just put any s***ty model and the page will be created dynamically with the chosen model, even if the model doesn't exist. Yep! I realized the same thing!!! It does mention the BIOS boot problem too... Does this mean their service is going to be great?

Hopefully those with the ST31000333AS don't get this problem. http://datacent.com/datarecovery/hdd/seagate/ST31000333AS

In another thread from somewhere else in the cloud (maybe this forum maybe Seagate, I can't remember) ANxx series firmware is for SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives and SNxx is for SATA drives. Both series of firmware are only for the ES.2 drives. These are the drives that end with NS instead of AS. Because of the advanced features of these drives for enterprise use, your drive will be bricked if you use their firmware on the AS series. Although, I think the Seagate firmware installer (like the PC BIOS firmware installer) will not only check the hardware manufacturer, but also the manufacturers part number and complain that it is incompatible. The same applies to CD/DVD firmware updates too for a given manufacturer. This prevents me from updating a Seagate with Maxtor firmware, and updating Seagate PATA vs. SATA, and even for a given SATA HDD part number etc with the wrong firmware.