A footnote to this problem. My 500Gb drive bricked on a restart. I was furious at first and then desperate. Went over to a WD to rebuild my life (you know how it is) swearing never to buy Seagate again.
I rang the numbers they gave,and sent two emails to the special address. Nothing. The numbers I rang in Sydney, Australia eventually took me, after following the prompts, to "The number you have dialled does not exist." #%@#*! The number for the local Sydney office for data salvage turned out to be an international call. Which didn't answer! DOUBLE#%@#*!
However, I did find that there was a Seagate sales/tech office in the mostly-commercial suburb of Parramatta where I work (you wouldn't live there). So I fronted up to the 7th floor (8th floor for Americans) of 91 Phillip Street and asked to see someone - anyone - who could help me work out what I could do about my bricked HDD. Tghat's when I met Sam. He was very understanding and said bring it in and I'm sure I can fix it. So the next day I did. He worked on it for 5 minutes and gave it back and said, see if it works now. It didn't. I emailed him the next day saying at least it was now recognised by the BIOS but that was all. I mentioned that there was a new information that the 500s didn't like the new Firmware SD1A and there was a new new update.
Sam called me back almost before I sent the email asking me to bring it back and he knew what to do having spoken to Korea. I took it back, he did something for about one minute and handed it back.
I now have my beautiful (better than WD) 7200.11 500Gb Seagate Barracuda back and working as a slave.
What I want to say is that corporately Seagate REALLY SUCKS but they have some real gems of human beings that they are lucky to have working for them delivering exceptional customer service. And their drives are really nice when they work.
This solution that I found won't work for a lot of people, but if you can find an actual office in your area with real human beings in it, you might get the same result I have. Good luck!

When I spoke to tech support, they claim they don't know anything (800-732-4283) about FREE data support. They want between $30 and $3500 to do it!

The company sure doesn't seem to have it's shit together!

Bob

This is nothing, but damage control.

It is going to take a while for Seagate to rebuild its reputation after these recent foul-ups.

"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."

Thats a joke.

It's been 5 days now since I contacted them and I have not heard a word. Not even something acknowledging my email.

I work in customer service and I would get fired if I treated my customers like this,

While visions of idealistic technies battling evil lawyers in a life-and-death struggle may make for good TV, there's a far more prosaic reason why the firmware download got pulled: it was bricking hard drives!

Read the Seagate forums right now and see how many people are complaining that after applying the firmware, they lose access to the drives.

WARNING: DO NOT APPLY THE FIRMWARE UPDATE!

It seems to be hit-or-miss. Some people report successful updates. But many people aren't, enough that Seagate obviously decided to pull the firmware. Obviously, a "fix" that screws up MORE drives isn't exactly helping Seagate's reputation for competence.

So... the firmware update which was there earlier in the day has since been removed "for validation". Very similar to how the KnowledgeBase article about the affected drives went up last week, only to disappear a short time later (then reappear again the following day).

All I can say is W... T... F?!??

A co-worker of mine may have nailed it; he thinks there is an internal struggle going on at Seagate. On the one hand, you've got the people who want to get the information (and a fix) out quickly; on the other hand, you've got those (maybe the lawyers?) who want to take a much more cautious, CYA approach.

They've started posting firmware updates in the KnowledgeBase area of the site. Not all of the affected drives have updates posted yet, but the update for my drive is already up.

I'll give it a go tonight and report back.

Oh, and it looks like they are posting bootable ISOs... so this may be relatively painless even for us Linux users!

FYI: In case it has not been posted here already, HERE are the pages where you determine if your Seagate 7200.11 drive needs new firmware:
http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/...
and
http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=...

I just checked my 1 TB drive that had a failure, and the "Serial Number" checker came back that my drive was not one of the affected drives, even though it was built in July 08, installed in Sept. 08, and "bricked" in December 08, had the faulty firmware (SD15) and was made in Thailand.

Called Seagate, they said, "That was strange" and decided it was affected. I told them that it was in a DVR, though, and they wouldn't agree to do the free data restore to another drive, claiming they were incapable due to the unknown formatting on the drive.

They honored the warranty, and are sending me a brand new used 1 TB drive with which they instructed me NOT to put it back in my DVR as it wasn't designed for that.

Moral of the story...call Seagate if the SN checker indicates your drive is unaffected, as it might still be, and don't count on getting your DVR programs moved to another drive.

I don't see anything in the knowledgebase article about the free data recovery. Is this another case of something getting posted, then subsequently removed?

Seagate did the right thing. Now, where's my 5 year warranty ?

Adi

I suspect the "free data recovery" will just involve them swapping the controller board and sending the now-working drive back to you, since it doesn't appear that this problem results in any errors/corruption of the disk itself -- the drive just stops talking to the rest of the system.

Still, it's good to see Seagate respond (however belatedly... though it takes time to work out the exact nature and scope of the problem and devise a plan to address it -- certainly longer than people with bricked hard drives are going to be happy about).

Are they fine with new firmware? I've been tempted to buy 1.5TB but held off due to all the negatives lately.

Wow, I'm glad I don't have any 7200.11 Barracudas...it's sounding like the whole line is affected.

Well 2 hours and 15 minutes later I can say calling them is worthless.

Well, I've just submitted the support request for the drive I have that is on the list of affected models. I'll keep y'all posted on how the firmware upgrade goes.

Cool. That's really cool. Especially if it's cheap for them.

Did my post here work or what?

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thr...

:-) I'm sure it's not because of the thread, but cuz of the many ppl that complained, but like to claim some credit!

Wow I dodged a bullet! I own the 250GB variant! :D

Well well, that's pretty awesome of them to offer data recovery. Funny that I'd thought of that as one thing they could offer to help ease people's minds as an above and beyond move. It certainly gives them better PR than they'd been getting over the problem.

just talked to a seagate rep on chat asking about the free recovery along with the replacement TB they sent me that died.

the rep said he wasn't aware of any free data recovery and said he had to forward the issue on to his team lead... I should get an email form seagate....

I will still stick to WD drives, but this is a very stand up thing to do by seagate the free data recovery i'm referring too.

So Kudos to them.

This little incident should reforce the notion of backing up your data on a regular basis even if that Hard drive is only 3 months old!

Great news, I can order a 1.5TB disk now :)

Did my post here work or what?

http://forums.seagate.com/stx/board/message?board.id=ata_drives&thr...

That's an awesome idea. They will have exabytes of free porn.

For those Linux users whose 7200.11 series drive is still spinning, you can use,

hdparm -I /dev/sda|b|c

to get the serial number without turning the machine off or using Windows to get to do it.

"In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on*. "

It would appear quite scary that whatever internal testing they do at the company can't catch this issue before it reaches manufacturing.

I would understand many more read/writes, but for this to show up in only 3 months can easily be emulated in a lab environment.

They did the right thing. Good for them, I will consider them fairly at my next upgrade.