[ale] Seagate 500GB Sata-CRASH!

[Adam Allred]

IDK if it applies particularly to your hard drive, but the bricking 
problem has gotten to be systemic enough to hit slashdot:

http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/01/17/0115207

In a nutshell: the firmware for the hard drive has a bug that "locks" 
the drive. It's supposedly not a hardware failure, or a safety 
issue...but a poorly built "feature".

Seagate's KB article says the problem applies to all 7200.11 models down 
to 160GB manufactured up to the end of 2008.

They're even offering free data recovery. I certainly hope there's 
nothing on the drive that prohibits it leaving your hands...

Hope this helps!

Adam


Paul Cartwright wrote:
> well, I was playing around with a 64 bit kernel, and decided to reboot. on 
> rebooting the CPU case was buzzing, I thought the cover was loose. When it 
> came back up it was giving me fsck errors on the mountable partitions on the 
> 2nd drive ( the NEW Seagate ).. oops, so I rebooted into 32bit mode, yeah, 
> well, no difference. So I booted into XP partition to install the latest 
> Bios, I'd been putting off doing that til my next reboot.. So I installed the 
> new BIOS, rebooted, nada. It took forever to reboot, I thought it was just 
> hanging at the Intel Matrix Storage manager section, but after a minute or 
> more it finally booted, but gave errors on all the /dev/sdbX partitions.
> I downloaded the Seagate drive utilities, and ran them, but it doesn't see a 
> drive attached to the bus ;(
> and I just GOT that drive when Circuit City went under !!!
> Seagate Barracuda st3500320A6 500Gb SATA drive.
> 
> any suggestions?? so much for my backup scheme.. hm, I better turn off the 
> rsync, come to think of it..