Re: Some Seagate hard drive users at risk

On Thu, 23 Jul 2009, Andy Civil wrote:

> 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!

Ouch. Sorry to hear that.  perhaps by sharing your experience, this will 
at least remind people on this list, who will not be encouraged to check 
their drives, now that it's not just rumoured to be a problem... :-(

> 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.

With Linux, we have some good tools to quickly check.
As root, or sudo the following command:

     hdparm -I /dev/sd? | egrep "Model|Serial|Firmware"

(I'm sure there are 23 other ways to get this info, depending on your 
distro, and some possibly not requiring root access.)

http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931#Id109278

Hmm. (or yikes?) 2 of 3 drive serial numbers I just entered into the 
website to test these instructions might be flagged as a problem. I'll 
have to look into this further... Andy, you may have just made my day ;-)

I'm also going to take this opportunity give PC Cyber a thumbs down here. 
I bought two drives in late winter, a fair time after this problem was 
known, and they were still selling drives with bad firmware, not having 
bothered to test them before sale. (I checked my SN as soon as I got the 
drive home)

Brett

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