Seagate denies problems with HD's manufacured before November! I just received this (date of the reply is 28.01., my email was sent 18.01.: --- quote starts here --- If you drive failed in September, then it was not in the series of drives that have the firmware issue. The series of drives that had the issue were manufactured in November and December. So your hard drive failure was completely separate issue. Additionally, we are not offering free data recovery. Our data recovery service is applying the firmware for our customers who's drives do not appear in the BIOS. If the firmware cannot be successfully applied, then the data recovery service is offered at regular price. You can, of course, use this same service, but it cannot be offered for free. If you have any further questions, please let us know. Regards, ---End of quote--- (will not quote name of that guy, obviously from the US) My HD was manufactured 01. April and died around 5. August (not detected by SATA controller, after some boots taking quite long, as far as I can remember). My SN is affected, confirmed with Seagate's checker again (which seems to be questionable as well, at least the database behind it). What are they talking about? Do they really know? I think it is time to point them to the charts on the 1st page of this thread. There is another post on page 9 (thanks Dadou), giving hope that i365 will do the job for free. I mentioned that in my email, quoting http://techreport.com/discussions.x/16246 ... However, I will try to fix the brick with the tips from Gradius2's thread myself. cooper2009 Edit: typos+link.