Lippy

See this thread on how to recover your Seagate. If you can't afford to pay the big data recovery firms, I'm afraid this is your only option. It's fairly easy to do though once you get your head round it. If you fix it using the solution in that thread, all your data should still be there just as you left it. I literally stuck my once dead Seagate back in my main computer after sending the last command through the terminal, and booted right off it. It worked as if nothing had ever gone wrong with it. Then you can safely transfer your data to another drive before you update the firmware on it so that it won't fail like that again.

Many thanks to solving this mess Seagate have put us in! I just brought my ST3100034AS with SD15 firmware back to life today thanks to this guide. It had the infamous BSY problem. Yeah, I know, I'm late. Had it die way back on Boxing Day 2008. First I had a dud USB to TTL adaptor, so I gave up for a while. Eventually I decided to play it safe and bought an RS232 to TTL adaptor as then it's all native. The only computer I had lying around that had an RS232 port was my old 500 MHz Pentium III from way back in 1998. I was about to give this thing away, but it seems it proved its usefulness after I fired it up for the first time in years. Yeah, the level of improvisation one has to make in order to fix this drive is quite amazing. I didn't really have much equipment around and there weren't many shops nearby selling much more than jumpers, so I bought a load of jumpers and decided to use them a bit like headers. Then I connected it all up. The TX from the adaptor went to the RX on the hard drive, and RX from the adaptor to the TX on the hard drive. I also used a 3V battery to power the adaptor because I didn't like the idea of chopping up my SATA cables. And of course, I wedged in a piece of card to separate the motor contacts. After plugging the SATA power cable to the hard drive from my main computer's PSU, the terminal session was all good to fire up. A couple of minutes later and the Seagate booted happily as if nothing ever went wrong with it. Everything was there the way I left it. So in other words, another epic success story. So yeah, a BIG THANK YOU for saving me from the black hole aka Seagate 'service'. You guys are awesome! Now proceeding to update the firmware... EDIT: Firmware updated to SD1A, it's all good.

My primary system. Hard drive is a Samsung Spinpoint F1 1 TB. RAM is low because I only have 2 DIMMs installed atm.

Skype 3.8 - Works fine on the x86 version despite a warning about it being incompatible. It crashes every few seconds on the x64 version however, making it unusable. Skype 4.0 beta 3 - Works. Firefox 3.0.5 - Works, but the theme has a minor display glitch. It thinks Aero on Windows 7 is an unsigned theme for some reason, so it looks a little incorrect. It's fully functional though. UPDATE: Firefox 3.0.7 and up has fixed the theme glitch. Team Fortress 2 - Works.

Model: ST31000340AS Firmware Version: SD15 Date Code: 09086 Serial Number: 9QJ20*** Site Code: KRATSG (Made in Thailand) Status: Bricked Seagate-Tool Says: AFFECTED

I can see it happen to laptops sooner rather than later. Netbooks already tend to use SSDs mainstream. Hard drives have much less capacity with a smaller form factor due to the way the data is stored. Therefore you will have a better deal in getting a 2.5" SSD vs a HDD compared to a 3.5" SSD vs a HDD. I'm not saying 2.5" SSDs are better than HDDs yet, but they are slowly getting there. As for desktops, not likely anytime soon. Perhaps after at least 5 years, but given the current trend of how fast the capacity of hard drives are going up, they could remain competitive for years.

I too got burned by this 7200.11 epic fail. I shut my desktop down on Christmas Day, only to find out the next morning it had gone. The hard drive spins up like normal, but the HDD LED is just permanently lit, and it just locks up there on the motherboard splash screen. There are no strange smells coming from the hard drive, and to me it's almost certainly the firmware virus that seems to have infected so many of these hard drives. I tried connecting it externally through USB and there is no drive detected. I'm not going to RMA it, if it means getting a refurbished hard drive with the same firmware which will probably crash out in another couple of months. I paid for a brand new hard drive, preferably a working one, so this is just outrageous to me. Instead I'm going to wait this out, hopefully there will be some kind of fix sooner or later. In the meantime I'm going to have to buy a replacement hard drive, which is obviously not going to be a Seagate. This is the last Seagate I'm owning. If this issue is so widespread they are going to lose so many customers over this. I've completely lost all respect for them. My problem with Seagate is not that they had a bad batch, as it can happen. The problem is how they are dealing with it, or rather not dealing with it. Just ignoring it despite the problem being obviously there is like a slap in the face to the customers. So I'm going to return the favour and buy a replacement hard drive from a rival manufacturer instead so I can get out of this hell hole they have created. It's not ideal having to pay even more money to get the hard drive I wanted in the first place, but if it means getting one that works instead of having to put up with something which will brick itself every couple of months, it's worth it. I wouldn't be surprised if they deliberately coded the firmware to crash out like that. I suppose time will tell... I guess that's my rant over. I must thank the people of these boards who are working on a way to fix this, and to keep all the information in one place. Hopefully justice will be done.

Here's another one, which I'm keeping cosy in my drawer for now. 48:9QJ2****:ST31000340AS:9BX158-303:SD15:09086 (28-08-08):KRATSG:(22-09-08):(26-12-08):OEM:Lippy:UK:BUSY (locks up at BIOS) EDIT: Found purchase date.