Warning: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

That's Seagate's screwup. Look at the top where it says updates for -303 drives, but in the list of firmware, it says for -300 drives. It's basically just an update for the -300 drives, but there are a lot of people like myself that have had -303 drives fail, and still have other -303 drives that need updating. We can't update because the updater is only for -300 drives.

Seagate once again manages to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. They just seem to be incompetent from beginning to end, even at a time like now when they should be pulling out all the stops to rescue the situation.

Thinking about it, I'm not even convinced that the firmware is the correct one, as SD1A was put out weeks ago for a problem with the 1.5 TB drives stalling out, and it seemed to degrade performance for a lot of people. It might just be a stopgap to keep people quiet, but Seagate couldn't even implement that properly.

 

Someone's been looking at the batch file and says it's broken. There's not one single confirmation on the Seagate forums that the upgrade can be performed, let alone that it prevents bricking.

 

I was prepared to give Seagate another chance once they'd owned up to the issue and decided to deal with it, but the longer it drags on with more and more screwups, the more I'm inclined to decide I don't want to ever deal with such a bunch of incompetent, clueless, useless, cowboys.

 

Try hitting F8 at boot time to step through the script.

 

I've just had an email from Seagate Support telling me the new firmware is not out yet, so I guess people should not be installing SD1A (not that it will install). Why it's linked as an upgrade to fix the bricking problem I have no idea - just another Seagate screw-up.

When I tried to inform them via chat (Seagate support don't frequent their own forums) that their webpages were wrong and misleading, I got a curt "we don't support firmware via chat" and was redirected to their trouble ticket system, then cut off. Not only is their system not available (it's being slash-dotted), it's no use anyway as I've not had any reply from any of the four cases I've opened there in the last month.

It's like every step Seagate take is designed to make sure customers curse their name and never buy another thing from Seagate.

 

Well, well. Seagate has updated the download so it works on -303 hardware. It seems to work on the 1 TB drive.

Unfortunately, people are saying drives are no longer recognised in RAID mode, and people with the 500 GB drive are getting bricked.

I'm not convinced the firmware is supposed to fix the boot-of-death, and I wonder if there will be another one this week.

 

True, but human nature being what it is, it should be expected people would run it without reading all the instructions, and then find that instead of offering a choice of what drive to update, the Seagate tool goes off and updates all drives.

The question should also be asked that if you are supposed to update drives one by one, why does the Seagate tool flash every drive it can find? It could easily be coded detect that there is more than one drive connected and refuse to run.

Of course this wouldn't be a problem if the flasher wasn't bricking drives instead of updating them.

 

Yeah, I read that, and basically he displays the same lack of care and is downplaying the issue as Seagate has been doing for the last year. He makes out it's only a small number of people with the problem, and confirms that Seagate just couldn't care less until the press got involved and what was a "customer problem" finally became a "Seagate problem".

There are a lot of people who had drives disappear within a few weeks/months, and they've known about this issue for ages. It seems Seagate couldn't care less if fifty thousand drives die, because they sold a few million of them so it's only a drop in the ocean.

Fact is every forum post on hundreds of sites is accompanied by "me too" statements, and for every person that posts, there are probably hundreds who just sent drives back silently.

If you look further down that Slashdot thread, you'll see a great response from someone who pretty much says the same thing: Seagate screwed their customers, and is now getting a taste of their own medicine.

 

Well as an update, new firmware was finally released. Those that had semi-bricked drives from the last firmware that was pulled on Tuesday got their drives and data back. Those that had properly bricked drives (ie BUSY/not seen by BIOS), this didn't restore them. Unsurprisingly, if your drive is locked into busy, it's not talking to anything that might be trying to flash it. You either have to use the DIY unbrick, send your drive to a data recovery company at high cost, or wait for the much rumoured (to the press), but nothing official (to the customer), free restore for the Seagate customers. More rumours are that Seagate will just be resetting the drives via their serial port, loading new firmware and sending them back, but that you'll have to be willing to "wait for it".

Of course, we still don't know if this new firmware will actually stop the drives failing to be seen at boot time. That's going to take a little time to see if anyone with the upgraded firmware sees the issue again.

 

Don't trust the online checker it's been shown to be pretty inaccurate, you'd be better off upgrading to the newer firmware to be on the safe side.