Well now that Seagate's problems with the 7200.11 boot-of-death are hitting the mainstream tech/news websites like The Inquirer, I was suprised and a little hopeful to read in the news report below:

According to data recovery experts Seagate has diagnosed the problem and issued a new firmware to address it. However, drives that have already been affected can't have the firmware applied to them due to their locked-down status.

Over a month into the problem Seagate had still not come back to customers with an official solution. Despite the company updating the firmware on newer drives, it has issued no recall on the firmware-defective drives that are still on shop shelves. 

So where's this firmware? Where can we get it and how to we apply it so that are drives are not bricked and have to go back for RMA?

I've already opened two trouble tickets in the last few weeks, both of which have been escalated by me, and ignored by Seagate, and as I'm in the UK I'm not inclined to wait on hold to the US for hours. 

Surely if Seagate have fixed this issue, you should be getting the news out to everyone in order to combat the bad publicity and let people know that your drives are good again.  If you won't get firmware out to customers, everyone will think your drives are still bad and prone to failure, and that you don't care about your customers.  Let us fix our drives at home so we don't lose data, and you don't have to spend time, money and customer goodwill dealing with RMAs.

just so you can estimate how long handling of cases entered via web form and escalated to support might take: I was lucky with the update SD1A update and got that in a timely manner; when getting a couple of CC1G drives at work, I had to open a new case.

Case entered & escalated : 2008-12-01

Response with firmware link from Support: 2009-01-12

I'm not going to write what I think  about that response time but you can probably make a good guess at my level of customer satsifaction..

So, I have a 7200.11 too and called the technical support. I've been told that this firmware update only applies only to HDD's with issues (files being corrupted, long wait times and such) and that  the broken HDDs are a result of wrongly applied firmware updates to healthy HDD's.

I hope mine doen'st breaks or do so before the warranty expires.  

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JimmyFearn wrote:
My advice would be to get the disk backed up and quick onto a different vendors disk. I have ordered a Western Digital disk as a replacement for my Maxtor / Seagate!

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Yep, I'm not going to wait for my drives to fail. I'm going to return them where I got them and get drives from a vendor that doesn't cover up their QA problems, thank you very much.