Seagate Baracuda 7200.11 HDD users, beware

If anyone has purchased one of these drives before January 2009 then check Seagates firmware update page http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/cr...p?DocId=207931 you might need to update the firmware of your drive.

I have one of these drives and I think it's less than a year old. A few days ago I switched on my pc and noticed it was not showing in "My computer" so I went to computer managment and no sign of it there, I then restarted and checked the BIOS, not recognised there either. I changed sata cables and tried differant ports still no joy. The HDD was spinning up and sounded normal and so this was a mystery to me until I searched online and dug really deep to discover that Seagate was at fault with the firmware in these particular drives, eg after a certain ammount of power off/on cycles once it reaches a certain digit, the drive gets locked and remains in a state of a continuous loop. Seagate has an updated firmware fix for these affected drives but you must update it when the drive is working normal before it goes into this continuous cycle. For those that have not updated the firmware and suddenly there drive dissappears, then there is no hope of updating as your drive is rendered totally useless and can only be sent to Seagate to get flashed. I was in the process of getting my drive returned to Seagate for the firmware flash and my data saved until I suddenly thought, no, my HDD is full of backed up images and files and I just did not trust them with my precious data. I dug deeper and found a few articles of doing this procedure yourself but it would involve soldering and buying componants etc, to cut a long story short I done it myself and it cost me just over £20 for the parts needed and a bit of patience. The parts/tools arrived today and I went ahead and got it back up and running within a few hours.

Here are a few images to try and show what was involved in restoring my HDD to it's normal state. As well as the tools/parts I also needed "Hyper terminal" which is not included in windows 7 or vista, but I downloaded the files and it ran ok on windows 7.





There was quite a lot of stuff involved including all the commands in Hyper terminal to get it back to it's normal state again, but I'm pleased to say it all went very smoothly and I was even imaging garden birds at the same time

Of course I had a guide to follow (commands in hyper terminal) that I could not have done without and will have to thank the person for creating that guide otherwise my data could have been lost if the HDD was sent to Seagate.

Crikey!!!! Its a good job you are technically minded! I wouldn't have had a clue!

Which is why I back up my photos as soon as I have got them off the memory card

Glad you got it sorted.
Alan.

Yes, I'd imagine most people won't, little you. I'm somewhat skilled in this type of stuff as I have worked on parts for tv's, done some SMT work (surface mount technology) on computer motherboards as well as general electronic stuff. And I also love a challenge and really enjoy doing stuff like this as it gives me a buzz

Yes, I have in total 4 backup HDD's (not just for images) 3 of which are external.
2 of the drives have identical backups but the one that went down had the latest updated files (images etc) but I had not time to sync it with the other one. I really was not that concerened after a while before realising it was the firmware's endless cycle fault. I new for deffinate it was not any physical damaged part of the drive but had to be the pcb which I probablly would have replaced from another identical drive had it been that.

I doubt very much if I will buy a Seagate HDD again. I feel sorry for those people that have probablly lost lots of precious memories, which I'm sure there are many, caused by Seagate. And a few will probablly just bin there HDD's thinking they are just faulty.

That's awful of them to have such a dicky product

Rather you than me fixing it though! I'd have no idea - and would end up resorting to Pritt Stick and Sellotape!

xx

I think I have one of those HDs too - thanks for the info DJ!