The Seagate Barracuda problem

[DanFraser]

I've got a Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive that appeared to die. Then I started to look up the symptoms and found that there is a huge 40-50% failure rate in these drives, particularly if it's made in Thailand and has tge firmware SD15.

Seagate still aren't forthcoming about the obvious failures which is usually on boot tge drive spins up normally but the bios hangs trying to detect (on most motherboards but mine recovers and continues).

It turns out rebooting is the cause. The drive gets stuck in busy mode and refuses to respond.

I've found a fix out there and I'm going to try it out as soon as I can find out more, as I've got data I desperately want back!

 

[Martel]

I had an old seagate drive that failed to boot now and then, finally would stop my computer from booting at all. Used my drive bay to hot plug it and recovered my data that way. If all else fails try getting an external enclosure or drive bay.

 

[Dermen]

They released a fixed firmware over a year ago, unfortunately it can only be applied before the drive dies. The problem is it is impossible to make everybody aware of it so the drives that didn't get flashed are still out there being used and will one day die.

I remember reading rumors about Seagate offering data retrieval service for dead SD15 drives, but I have no idea if that is true.