The thought of widespread faulty drives is probably each and every hard-drive manufacturer's worst nightmare. For Seagate, that nightmare is quickly turning into reality in 2009.
Earlier this week, we reported that certain Seagate drives contained faulty firmware that resulted in disks becoming undetectable by the host system. As expected, hundreds of users poured into Seagate's support forums hankering to get their hands back on their precious data.
Seagate, to its credit, acknowledged the problem and offered a free data-recovery service for those affected, along with the promise of a forthcoming firmware update. That very update - dubbed firmware SD1A - arrived promptly for Seagate customers but rather than alleviating concerns, it is reportedly rendering large numbers of drives completely unusable.
According to users of Seagate's community forums, each-and-every person who has attempted to update their 500GB Barracuda 7200.11 drive (model number ST3500320AS) with the new firmware has been left with a bricked drive. Consequently, the firmware update - which, we should add, appeared successful for larger-capacity Barracuda drives - has been withdrawn by Seagate until further notice.
Unhappy Seagate customers can, however, take a little comfort in the knowledge that their updated-but-erroneous 500GB drives appear to be detectable by a system's BIOS, leaving the door open for the next forthcoming patch.
One particular user on Seagate's forums, going by the username of JATownes, claims to have spoken to Seagate's technical support and says: "According to tech support, data is still good and a new f/w will bring the drive back to life, as if nothing was wrong, but no eta on the new revision".
We await official word from Seagate itself.
Source: forums.seagate.com
