My Seagate 500GB 7200.11 copped the BSY bug about 4 days ago now. This has been confirmed as a "firmware corruption" by a data recovery firm in Melbourne that I could get a hold of.
Just like to point out that poking around looking for help from Seagate in Australia as a regular joe, with no business, and no fax machine (unless I fork out for a modem card and get a fax program a little more usable than Windows'), you're pretty much SOL. If you're an aussie, please consider Seagate to be a company who doesn't really want to know that you have a problem but will happily charge you for it... ok that's harsh. They actually won't even charge you for it since contacting them about it, unless you're a resident of Sydney and could probably knock on their door without too much of a hassle, is unreasonably difficult. You'd think at least a phone number that was attached to a person at some point, even if they had to gate it through an enquiry filtering machine, wouldn't be too big an ask for an electronics company that enjoyed a reputation for reliability and a reasonable market share. Even an email address would be nice.
On a side-note, on trying to make an account, it also seemed like the website was also interested in redirecting you to give Seagate money rather than make regular enquiries about, in my case, what my options are as a consumer half a continent away from some branch Seagate set up which won't talk to you unless you still run a fax machine. There isn't even a template for the fax to send the office in Sydney to expedite a solution like what problem you want them to fix. So basically fax them a, "Call me. Call me now at #####." and sound like porn spam via fax perhaps?
The set up in Australia may have been fine when Seagate drives were the pinnacle of reliability and there weren't stupid screw ups like this firmware issue, but seriously, after so many years of the problem being aired, are you guys serious about enforcing your warranties and such?
