Barracuda XT, Barracuda, Barracuda Green, DiamondMax and other desktop SATA and IDE drives

[Simon66]

mechad... You obviously did not read a THING about the firmware issue. 

Its users like you that talk about the sky falling and inserting their issues into a current problem that will probably make this forum disappear.

I am curious to see that if I post and say that green smoke is coming out of my drive how many of you intelligent people will say they have the same issue and then describe a completely differnt thing.

Congratulations you had a perfectly good product removed? I don't know if I should laugh or cry. 

[donidonidoni]

I finally got an email from Seagate support -- thanks Alan for escalating my ticket. They say they will be calling me to explain why it does not seem to be a firmware issue. I'll post back with any useful information.

So if it really isn't a firmware issue afterall... I wonder if some commonly-reported symptoms are not of widespread firmware problems, but in fact widespread hardware problems (is that better or worse?) that may be exacerbated by firmware updates. So perhaps we are seeing a mix of firmware and hardware quality control problems. Niether case is a happy one, but I'll post back with whatever I find.

Message Edited by donidonidoni on 02-10-2009 12:25 PM

[mechad]

sorry to be so hasty, i'm a little at wits end with Seagate Support here.

I filed a claim, I called suppoprt  and I contacted someone via chat. All of them used the S/N checker and said that my drive was just broken, despite having the same failure of the drive to be recognized in bios as users with the firmware problems.Then I was told that there was nothing more that could be done besides RMA and that I had to pay for drive recovery services myself. They dont recognize a major problem with these drives that aren't in the S/N checker - and clearly a ton of people that are not in the S/N range are having similar problems, whether firmware or hardware.

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Simon66 wrote:

mechad... You obviously did not read a THING about the firmware issue. 

Its users like you that talk about the sky falling and inserting their issues into a current problem that will probably make this forum disappear.

I am curious to see that if I post and say that green smoke is coming out of my drive how many of you intelligent people will say they have the same issue and then describe a completely differnt thing.

Congratulations you had a perfectly good product removed? I don't know if I should laugh or cry. 

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This is not a perfectly good product, Simon66, there are major hardware problems with this particular drive as about 30% of the reviews for this product on newegg are 1 or 2 stars and related to this same drive failure and many people on this forum with the 750Gb Barracuda are having the same problem. but thanks for the kind words, your smarm is also very helpful to issues. I've read as much about this problem as I can, but as Seagate is extremely unforthcoming about the myriad of problems, i'm sure I've missed a ton of good info, I've potentially even missed a valid fix.

Sorry if i'm coming off angry or ignorant here, but the real failure is in Seagate not addressing or recognizing issues with these drives, causing major confusion and panic. By being forthcoming and compassionate to it's customers, Seagate could much more effectively deal with this problem and retain customers.

[Karlston]

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mechad wrote:

All of them used the S/N checker and said that my drive was just broken, despite having the same failure of the drive to be recognized in bios as users with the firmware problems.Then I was told that there was nothing more that could be done besides RMA and that I had to pay for drive recovery services myself. They dont recognize a major problem with these drives that aren't in the S/N checker - and clearly a ton of people that are not in the S/N range are having similar problems, whether firmware or hardware.

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I believe that this is the fundamental problem that Seagate do not want to address.  They have found one source of the problem, aren't looking for other sources, so programmed their serial checker to only recognise those drives affected by the first source.

Then some of us whose drive is one of the affected models and has one of the affected firmware and also spew green smoke and has a purple glow, are told by the serial checker that it's unaffected by the "green smoke spewing and purple glowing" problem.

[lawrence1976]

I just bought my ST31000340AS drive from a local retailer back in September 2008. Last week I turned on my computer, booted into XP, and within 2 minutes the machine froze on me. So I rebooted (no S.M.A.R.T. error messages) and attempted to go into Safe Mode, however the problem was still there. At this point I started to get nervous and decided to create an image of my machine just in case the drive was failing. The program (Acronis) reported finding bad sectors, so I used the SeaTools for DOS utility and the drive failed the basic test. After running the longer test, it found over 700 sector errors which could not be repaired. The final error message was "drive not responding to commands, verify cables" or something similar.

I filed an RMA before finding this thread and decided to try & upgrade the firmware (apparently it's only a preventative fix that does not resolve the issue after the drive has already failed). That was successfull. Upon reboot, S.M.A.R.T. give me an error stating I should back up my data (would've appreciated that info prior to it going belly up).

So now my music studio is down for a week while I wait for this refurbished drive which will more than likely have the same problem. Wonderful.... 

Message Edited by lawrence1976 on 02-10-2009 03:09 PM

Message Edited by lawrence1976 on 02-10-2009 03:09 PM

[mechad]

I'm going to try MooseDT-SD1A-3D4D-16-32MB.ISO to see if it will fix my SD15 ST3750330AS drive, i'll post results as soon as i get some.

edit - Updating to SD1A did nothing for my problem, the drive is still unable to read altho my HDD light is MUCH less pegged now

Message Edited by mechad on 02-10-2009 04:48 PM

[Finalnight]

Has anyone else experienced their drive starting to click randomly (like the heads are disengaging, etc) since upgrading their firmware. I took my ST3640323AS to SD1B and the issue has been happening since then.

[donidonidoni]

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Finalnight wrote:
Has anyone else experienced their drive starting to click randomly (like the heads are disengaging, etc) since upgrading their firmware. I took my ST3640323AS to SD1B and the issue has been happening since then.

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yes, this is one of the reported problems. i suffer that on my ST31000333AS with SD1B. haven't yet received my promised callback from Seagate support. hopefully tomorrow.

Message Edited by donidonidoni on 02-10-2009 05:53 PM

[HughR]

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mechad wrote:

 I desperately need to recover data off this faulty drive, and mounting it on Linux  I can see that the data is still there, but I get bad sector reads on EVERY BYTE i try to access, suggesting that this is likely a firmware or controller problem... yet Seagate wont help. If anyone has any luck with the SD1A, please let us know.

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I don't understand.  If you can "see that the data is still there" in Linux, it must be reading some data.  After all, the filenames, directories, inodes, etc. are all stored as data.

Your report isn't self-consistent, as far as I can tell.

What filesystem type are you using?

[DavisR]

"contact to support" ....

I've created case 00231313 five days ago. Still no answer at all!

I think I cannot return this drive because my problem is "drive stops to respond" and I cannot repeat this problem by demand.

Long test passes OK but I cannot use this drive after firmware update. It stops suddenly...

Support ignores me.

What have I do, Alan?