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Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Troubles


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4. for you to come in here and defend seagate, it's just plain stupid - especially if you are not paid by them, and you are disclosing your info and business. please do yourself and your future paychecks a favour, and stop coming in here to defend Seagate. NO ONE here has any good opinions of seagate after how they dealt with us and banned us from their forums.

5. if you wish to defend seagate, i suggest you do it in your storagesecrets AND believe me when i say this - do it in the seagate forums. not only will people be more receptive to you, the seagate moderators would probably love you to death.

No need to jump on other people when they give their view.

Keep it between the lines please ;), and that counts for all of us here.

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Didn't see that one - I was Googling for Dell, HP, Seagate, firmware etc. and didn't get anything intresting back. I see the Dell forum thread you posted was actually started by Oliver.HH and he subsequently posted a reply with Dell's firmware fix. This is apparently just for the ST3500620AS. What's up with that, Oliver.HH? It almost looks like they had no idea about the problem until recently. Did Dell support have anything to say?

Looking at the HP site, I can only find a single unanswered post here regarding the problem.

On one hand, I can't believe this problem is 'as big' with OEM drives considering a single post on either forum about the problem. On the other hand, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Dell or HP treadmill support farms missing such a widespread problem - they just send out another drive under warranty whenever anyone calls about a bricked drive and the OEMs return the old one to Seagate for credit. With all the drives they have out there, you would expect them to have recognized the problem months ago and worked out the firmware issues with Seagate. Is it possible that they simply have not recognized a pattern yet? Or is it an extremely rare issue on OEM drives?

I guess I'm really confused, now.

That is just in the business forums. Here is one I found in the personal forums that says HP has just recently become aware of the problem and a FW update is coming.

1

Here is another, 2

See most people are still not aware of the FW problem and most do not know to post that it is the FW problem. So they just call HP and if it is in warranty, they get a new drive, never knowing there is a problem with the FW.

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I just posted a question on the IOMEGA forums about zip drives. However, while I was there I saw alot of people

with external drives that are panicking about dead drives (seagate drives of course).

I posted a response and a link to this forum. Hopefully, people there will read it and come here.

The flood is coming!

Edited by mikesw
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Guys, any ideas how I could get my data back, while I still have the chance? It shows in BIOS, The DataRecovery progs can see it, it's just, when they scan certain sectors, boom, hard drive goes to failsafe and just locks it self, till the next power-up. Active@ Unerase , GetDataBack, They see the files, I just need to tell them somehow to skip dead sectors. Anybody know if there is a software to map the Bad Sec's?

Any luck?

I am having the same problem! My 1TB Seagate died last summer after 2 months of use; BIOS recognized as 0 GB, "fixed" a few days ago using RS232-TTL commands outlined here.

XP now lists the drive (but not the volume name), but system runs slow and if I try to click on the recovered drive, explorer locks up. I've been using FileRescue Professional (overkill, lesser version would work as well), and I have successfully recovered some data, BUT -- the slightest hiccup such as a bad sector will render the drive completely unreadable by data recovery programs, etc until I reboot.

Rebooting with this drive attached takes about 20 to 30 minutes. Is there any program that will skip the bad sectors or something without disabling the drive??

OR Is it possible to reset the drive without rebooting? Maybe a software method or perhaps disconnecting and reconnecting the sata power cable?

PLEASE HELP! :blink:

Edited by hallwal
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I GUESS that "data recovery" programs try several times to read a given sector and create the lock. :unsure:

"Standard" procedure is the following:

  • have another disk of same of greater capacity (better if two)
  • copy/clone defective hard disk contents on new drive (better if twice)
  • work with recovery programs on the clone

This way if you encounter a problem or make a mistake you can simply re-image from original or second copy and start again.

Suitable programs for doing the copy are "dd-like" programs that DO NOT attempt copying bad sectors and simply skip them.

http://www.garloff.de/kurt/linux/ddrescue/

http://www.forensicswiki.org/wiki/Ddrescue

http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/Dd_rescue

Please note that "dd", "ddrescue" and dd_rescue" have different syntax.

Some dd version have the option "noerror", which means that it will skip bad sectors.

Cannot say if using any of these will "trigger" the HD error nonetheless. :unsure:

Under windows, besides the Cygwin port of the above, one could try:

dsfo/dsfi, part of the dsfok package:

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~nulifetv/freezip/freeware/

dd for windows (FAU edition):

http://gmgsystemsinc.com/fau/

Or maybe some of the programs listed here:

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=16534

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=100299

Once you have managed, one way or the other, to recover the recoverable, probably you can restore the drive to "normal" operation.

According to Seagate :ph34r:, depending on the errors you get, a zero fill (by forcing writes to bad sectors encountered) may re-create the g-list:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000dd04090aRCRD

* "Defective drive" and "Corrupted format" errors (sometimes called 03/31 errors) can often be repaired with a data-destructive zero fill data pattern or a low level format. Current disk drives contain thousands of spare sectors which are automatically reallocated if the drive senses difficulty reading or writing. Since SeaTools is read-only (data safe), occasionally a problem sector that has not reallocated to a spare sector can be forced to do so by writing to that sector. Spare sector reallocation is a normal intelligent drive operation.

It's debatable whether the adjective intelligent is attributed to "operation" or to "drive", if the latter I find it largely inaccurate. :whistle:

It is possible that using a disk editor and forcing the write on single sectors (found as "bad"), will create the g-list entry, but it might be a loooong work, if the bad sectors are not a handful (please note the accuracy of my definition of this amount ;))

jaclaz

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hallwal,

Use Seagate Seatools to do short/long DST/generic tests. See if those passes.

If those fails, then use the Seatools for DOS (create a bootable CD from the iso in Program FilesSeagateSeatools - or something like that) and use the DOS version to do a long test. The DOS version allows you to fix any problems found.

HTH.

Guys, any ideas how I could get my data back, while I still have the chance? It shows in BIOS, The DataRecovery progs can see it, it's just, when they scan certain sectors, boom, hard drive goes to failsafe and just locks it self, till the next power-up. Active@ Unerase , GetDataBack, They see the files, I just need to tell them somehow to skip dead sectors. Anybody know if there is a software to map the Bad Sec's?

Any luck?

I am having the same problem! My 1TB Seagate died last summer after 2 months of use; BIOS recognized as 0 GB, "fixed" a few days ago using RS232-TTL commands outlined here.

XP now lists the drive (but not the volume name), but system runs slow and if I try to click on the recovered drive, explorer locks up. I've been using FileRescue Professional (overkill, lesser version would work as well), and I have successfully recovered some data, BUT -- the slightest hiccup such as a bad sector will render the drive completely unreadable by data recovery programs, etc until I reboot.

Rebooting with this drive attached takes about 20 to 30 minutes. Is there any program that will skip the bad sectors or something without disabling the drive??

OR Is it possible to reset the drive without rebooting? Maybe a software method or perhaps disconnecting and reconnecting the sata power cable?

PLEASE HELP! :blink:

BTW, whoever said this is not a big problem because the major vendors are not affected - please check your facts again.

Look here:

http://support.dell.com/support/topics/glo...;l=en&s=gen

Even more important is you see this right on the homepage on http://support.dell.com -> Hot Topics -> Seagate Drive Inaccessible

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You guys may want to try out this software.

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/index.html

The GUI is,

gsmartcontrols

This allows nondestructive testing of drive, dumping of internal logs

They mention it has "-d usbcypress" support but the latest version I got

doesn't seem to understand this command nor is it in the command line -h listing.

I have a western digital 250gig ide attached to a sabrent ide -> usb adaptor.

The software doesn't see this drive although gmsmartcontrol thinks there is something there (the icon)

After running msinfo32 and displaying the USB VID and PID for my adaptor, the chipset device is

VID 152D and PID 2338. I then searched ww.linux-usb.org/usb.ids and found that it was a JMicron Tech Corp

chipset that had the functional capabilities of the JM20337 Hi Speed USB to SATA/PATA combo bridge.

So perhaps this along with the PID 2335 could be added for this manufacter along with all the other

bridges for external drives to smartmontools!

There is no way at the commandline to scan ones system and list all drive devices instead of guessing

them one-by-one.

It would be nice to be able to list all the master/slave, model, firmware and the smartmontools device name

as one command i.e like,

smartclt -d ?

Theres also a daemon monitor called smartd.

Failure Analysis articles listings and the one on "Myth or Metric". :thumbup

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/links.html

I also ran the tool "diskid32" that is free from winsim inc. and it showed alot of useful info about master/slave

and the drive model and firmware etc.

Edited by mikesw
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My computer can't detect my ST31000340AS drive. It isn't even recognized in BIOS. 2 months of using it and then it suddenly isn't recognized any more, making me lose all my work. Guess I should send it back and ask for a replacement :}

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My computer can't detect my ST31000340AS drive. It isn't even recognized in BIOS. 2 months of using it and then it suddenly isn't recognized any more, making me lose all my work. Guess I should send it back and ask for a replacement :}

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. :thumbup

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Oh my...

It seems that there is still some issues with Seabrick...

It is not clear, but by the thread title i can suppose it is the SD1A.

Comment of warpandas from 01-30-2009 07:24 AM

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/messag...ing&page=10

"I completed a successful firmware upgrade on my ST31000340AS one week ago after receiving problems of an I/O device error in Windows Vista when I tried to access my data on the harddrive. Now, one week later, I am completely unable to access my harddrive. BIOS will not detect it.

Anyone else?"

There is another guy (avivahl) reporting similar problems with ST3500320AS in this same thread.

Correct. There are reports of issues with firmware update and also with repair (not all drives are equal).

I'm working on a topic for troubleshooting firmware update/post-repair issues. If anyone interested PM.

For example, procedures like the clearing (read: erase) of G-List are not hassle free, because if it contains

entries then some problems (bad sectors/data-corruption) will appear since these are defective sectors that

gets remapped into to spares (large drives can have thousands of spare sectors for reallocation) and/or if

translator is corrupted after repair (remember not all drives are equal) some 'repaired' may end-up like this:

hdtunebadscanzh7.th.jpg

You guys may want to try out this software.

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/index.html

The GUI is,

gsmartcontrols

This allows nondestructive testing of drive, dumping of internal logs

They mention it has "-d usbcypress" support but the latest version I got

doesn't seem to understand this command nor is it in the command line -h listing.

I have a western digital 250gig ide attached to a sabrent ide -> usb adaptor.

The software doesn't see this drive although gmsmartcontrol thinks there is something there (the icon)

There is no way at the commandline to scan ones system and list all drive devices instead of guessing

them one-by-one.

Theres also a daemon monitor called smartd.

Failure Analysis articles listings and the one on "Myth or Metric". :thumbup

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/links.html

Here is latest release from CVS compiled for Win32, but may be unstable:

http://rapidshare.com/files/197069196/smar...win32-setup.exe

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HY8P3FW0

MD5: ffea4156be1a490daa3205bb07f893f2

Dumping attributes and logs is fine but doing DSTs (they are the same as in SeaTools) can be a

problem if the drive has wrong translation parameters (it may incorrectly reallocate non-defective

sectors) or old firmware (may trigger boot of death since it increases drive Event Log count).

I'm working on a 7200.11 failure analysis research. Requirement is old firmware and setting up

a script or policy to run it on every power-cycle, if it fails the results may pinpoint a pattern (from

raw attribute values, logs, incorrect checksum, etc) that can be used for prediction/workaround.

smartdmp.bat

@echo off
smartctl -s on -a -q noserial /dev/pd0 >> c:\smartlog.txt
smartctl -l sataphy /dev/pd0 >> c:\smartlog.txt
smartctl -l scttemp /dev/pd0 >> c:\smartlog.txt
smartctl -l xerror /dev/pd0 >> c:\smartlog.txt

pd0 for 1st physicaldrive, pd1 for 2nd and so on. Can check under Computer Management > Disk Management.

Support for external drives and RAID is limited. Try adding -d option (option=3ware, areca, hpt, sat, usbcypress)

Most of these options will only work correctly with v5.39 experimental release from CVS (see Win32 links above).

I think Seagate may end-up adding the old Maxtor liability sticker into their new drives... :lol:

maxliabilityoh3.gif

Edited by sieve-x
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Did anybody notice, that Seagate seems to have updated the firmware (at least for ST3500320AS) on http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/self...sp?DocId=207951? I just downloaded the file again, it has a different checksum and a different date (2009-02-10 00:01), I haven't yet checked for differences in content.

I extracted the boot image of the latest moose updater and did a file compare with the previous version using a hex editor. There are numerous differences. Whether these changes are additional validity checks, bug fixes to the flashing software, or actual changes to the SD1A firmware, I wasn't able to tell. I posted a question on the Seagate board as to whether my 500GB drives should be reflashed with this latest updater, but there were no useful replies.

Edit: I reflashed both of my 500GB drives today with the latest SD1A flasher. The update was uneventful. Both drives are operating okay. One drive was originally an SD15 and the other was an SD04 before the first flash to SD1A. They operated okay after the first flash also.

Edited by ove1
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Hi

I have a ST3500320AS in my system, I checked and it has firmware SD04, I've had it for about a year and no trouble yet, I put in my serial number into seagates website and it said my drive is not affected. Do you think its OK or should I flash it?

Anyway the main thing was I also have an IOMEGA 1TB External USB Drive, its ST31000333AS and it has the dreaded SD15 firmware. I also typed my serial number into seagate and it said it was affected. It hasn't had much use yet but after some searching I found the firmware upgrade for it on the site, its called Brinks-3D6H-SD1B.ISO, so I burn it to a CD but it doesn't boot up, it gets to FreeDos then nothing happens. Yes the CD is the first boot device, I tried other bootable disks and they are fine. My DVD writer is SATA but its found fine and so is the HD (for now it still works). I've tried it without the ST31000333AS plugged in, with my regular ST3500320AS but still no luck.

I tried CD-R DVD-R DVD-RW and they burn and verify OK. Not sure what else it could be except a faulty image on seagates part. I heard some mention of a firmware they will give you if you request it?

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Am I having a completely different problem then the rest of you?

I have 3 x 1.5 TB 7200.11 drives. All have been updated to first SD1A and then SD1B. Two of the drives have been ejected from my RAID 5 array at different times due to several read errors of sectors on the disks.

I am able to reintroduce the disks after a deep format/wipe of the disk.

Does this mean that my disks are simply bad and that I need to RMA them or is this related to the freezing, disks not being detected errors that I'm reading about?

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