Re: Some Seagate hard drive users at risk

Incredible; I just suffered from this, but it raises the question of how to 
raise people's awareness of it. I read your mail back in January, but I didn't 
realise that I had a Seagate drive. I don't remember buying it!

I was going to post about it myself, but if your post didn't protect me, then 
how was my post going to protect others? The sad fact is, normal people don't 
know what brand of hard disk they have... they have lives to lead! And it's not 
sufficiently likely for you to go digging in your computer to check.

Anyway, thanks for trying, Brett, and if anyone reading this has suffered the 
problem, I have successfully un-bricked my drive, and could help others do the 
same. I found instructions on the Internet, but I won't post the link because 
one critical step was missing, and I can't contact the author to have it 
corrected, so unlike Wikipedia, it's going to stay there broken, unfortunately.

Anyone remotely technical could achieve the same thing, by the way, you need 
something that can connect to the serial diagnostic port at 3V rather than RS232 
levels, and a T6 torx screwdriver. You get your data back, and then you can 
upgrade the firmware.

-- 
Andy


Brett Delmage wrote:
> This is off-topic and not news to some, but the consequence of losing 
> access to your data on your hard drive for weeks is so painful that I 
> thought I'd bring it to the attention of list members anyway. I myself did 
> not know of this issue until the recent Slashdot article, even though I 
> have a dozen Seagate drives, many potentially affected by this software 
> defect.
> 
> Some larger Seagate drives manufactured thorugh Dec 2008 may have a 
> serious firmware bug that can cause permanent failure to communicate with 
> the host. The data is likely ok on the platters, but you likely won't get 
> it back quickly, or necessarily cheaply.
> 
> More information available at Seagate's web site
> http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931#Id109278
> 
> You have to love their intro:
> "Welcome, Seagate hard drive owners.  A number of Seagate hard drives from 
> the following families may become inaccessible when the host system is 
> powered on:"
> 
> Welcome indeed.
> 
> And there sure are a lot of upset users in their user forum...
> 
> As usual, your best defence is to BACKUP YOUR DATA - in this case, ideally 
> on a non-Seagate drive, in this case :-p
> and don't power-down. Linux users may be ahead of ms windows users on 
> this.
> 
> As luck would have it I have about 6 affected drives, some are my backups 
> drives, normally kept in a fire safe, and I'm powering up and down a lot 
> for HW and kernel changes on some of the other drives.
> 
> Question for the list: is it desirable to build redundant RAID arrays like 
> RAID 1 with similar drives from different manufacturers to minimize the 
> risk of problems like this, or does that lead to other problems?
> 
> (Note! I'm not here for a debate about the 'best' manufacturer. I've been 
> through enough drives over the years that ALL of them have had their 
> failures runs at times, and I have switched between manufacturers as 
> required.)
> 
> Brett

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