[icefloe01]

Leigh.Wanstead, on Jan 17 2009, 05:34 PM, said:

in terms of the number, it is a freephone number so you should be able to ring it from new zealand if you get the right extension. personally, i am in the UK and i rang it through skype no problems and didnt get charged

I think that Telecom New Zealand still will charge me. I can not find landline term. The reference is for mobile phone.

The good thing is, you could email them for free. One person posted here saying that these cases are granted priority...
Contact Seagate via email

This post has been edited by icefloe01: 17 January 2009 - 04:54 PM

[lavan]

Leigh.Wanstead, you can call to the US department (1.800.732.4283) It's free via skype

[PrOdiGy1]

lavan, on Jan 17 2009, 11:10 PM, said:

Leigh.Wanstead, you can call to the US department (1.800.732.4283) It's free via skype

that is exactly what i said in my previous post!

[cdturri]

For those wanting to scream at someone I suggest you go to the Contact Us page in Seagate.com (http://www.seagate.c...out/contact_us/) and click on Media. There are a couple of people you could email:

COMMUNITY RELATIONS
elena.sexton@seagate.com
ian.o'leary@seagate.com
lotus.tan@seagate.com

Consumer Solutions Division / Seagate and Maxtor Retail / Storage Solutions
nathan.papadopulos@seagate.com
siobhan.m.lyons@seagate.com

Desktop and Notebook Storage
michael.hall@seagate.com

I already emailed all them. Make them hear your pain, let's make their mail inboxes get full with our complaints.

If they don't want to hear about it so be it. One email per drive dead should be a reasonable punishment!!!

[gvsyn]

Ahh, just managed to successfully reset the BSY flag.... typically just as was just sorting out a post for more information on the steps.

This post has been edited by gvsyn: 17 January 2009 - 07:34 PM

[pksw]

Leigh.Wanstead, on Jan 18 2009, 09:34 AM, said:

PrOdiGy1, on Jan 18 2009, 09:52 AM, said:

in terms of the number, it is a freephone number so you should be able to ring it from new zealand if you get the right extension. personally, i am in the UK and i rang it through skype no problems and didnt get charged

I think that Telecom New Zealand still will charge me. I can not find landline term. The reference is for mobile phone.

Reference:
http://www.telecomro...Conditions.aspx

Anyway what is the point for Seagate to ask their customer to call them to get a free firmware? It just waste their resource and my time and money. They want to keep their support center's job? That is the only reason I can think of. I heard from tomshardware that seagate got their staff redunant before this hard drive's problem disclosed.

My college told me that his hard drive was broken which is the exact model mentioned here and he personally sent back to the shop and waiting for Seagate's assessment and not get the drive back now. My understanding is that the good practise the shop should just simply swap a new hard drive for the customer. The shop should not let the customer waiting the hard drive for months.

Stop whinging and just send an email to seagate via their website. I am in Australia, so it's not much different for either of us. What is the point of your colleague getting a new hard disk with the same firmware bug for the old one? It's up to Seagate to fix the problem, not the retail store.

[mikesw]

Leigh.Wanstead, on Jan 17 2009, 03:15 PM, said:

What about me living in New Zealand? Should I make a overseas phone call? Where is the seagate New Zealand's support phone call number?

Can anyone posted their firmware update url on this thread to save me to rescue my hard drive quickly? It is so hard to backup nearly 1tb hard drive. It will require around 200 dvd+r disk and lots of time sitting in front of the pc to do backup. I am not against backup. Just I am lazey. I know it is bad. But I think it is ok.

Thanks

Regards
Leigh

Why not get two cheap 500 gig laptop drives for the USB port and backup to that? Then you don't need 200 DVDs or blurays at 25gigs each

[Leigh.Wanstead]

mikesw, on Jan 18 2009, 02:57 PM, said:

Leigh.Wanstead, on Jan 17 2009, 03:15 PM, said:

What about me living in New Zealand? Should I make a overseas phone call? Where is the seagate New Zealand's support phone call number?

Can anyone posted their firmware update url on this thread to save me to rescue my hard drive quickly? It is so hard to backup nearly 1tb hard drive. It will require around 200 dvd+r disk and lots of time sitting in front of the pc to do backup. I am not against backup. Just I am lazey. I know it is bad. But I think it is ok.

Thanks

Regards
Leigh

Why not get two cheap 500 gig laptop drives for the USB port and backup to that? Then you don't need 200 DVDs or blurays at 25gigs each

You may understand that I should not trust any hard drive. I think dvd+r is far more safe bet than hard drive. blurays is far more dear than dvd+r.

BTW, all I want now is a Western Digital 2tb, so I can copy everything to it from the 1tb seagate one. But 2tb is not available in New Zealand for now.

[Leigh.Wanstead]

From reading the seagate forum, I think they can simply ignore your email whatever if they wish. Reading the post here, they deleted the post if not their taste on seagate forum. I don't want to be treated this way.

Let's make it simple, I realy wish someone here post a url to the new firmware after next Tuesday if seagate release the firmware to save my time. I think that won't break any confidential contract/license and won't damage anyone.

Regards
Leigh

pksw, on Jan 18 2009, 02:43 PM, said:

Leigh.Wanstead, on Jan 18 2009, 09:34 AM, said:

PrOdiGy1, on Jan 18 2009, 09:52 AM, said:

in terms of the number, it is a freephone number so you should be able to ring it from new zealand if you get the right extension. personally, i am in the UK and i rang it through skype no problems and didnt get charged

I think that Telecom New Zealand still will charge me. I can not find landline term. The reference is for mobile phone.

Reference:
http://www.telecomro...Conditions.aspx

Anyway what is the point for Seagate to ask their customer to call them to get a free firmware? It just waste their resource and my time and money. They want to keep their support center's job? That is the only reason I can think of. I heard from tomshardware that seagate got their staff redunant before this hard drive's problem disclosed.

My college told me that his hard drive was broken which is the exact model mentioned here and he personally sent back to the shop and waiting for Seagate's assessment and not get the drive back now. My understanding is that the good practise the shop should just simply swap a new hard drive for the customer. The shop should not let the customer waiting the hard drive for months.

Stop whinging and just send an email to seagate via their website. I am in Australia, so it's not much different for either of us. What is the point of your colleague getting a new hard disk with the same firmware bug for the old one? It's up to Seagate to fix the problem, not the retail store.

[frallanfree]

So guys is it anyone that have sent their affected drive to Seagate for free data recovery on a replacement drive yet?

I would like to know how im gonna do to get this service so i can get my data back on a new working drive.

For your information i have also laid 2 cases on their site one to claim the free recovery on new drive and also get hold on the firmware update.

This post has been edited by frallanfree: 17 January 2009 - 09:48 PM

[lavan]

frallanfree, on Jan 18 2009, 06:47 AM, said:

So guys is it anyone that have sent their affected drive to Seagate for free data recovery on a replacement drive yet?

I called to them, they confirmed free data recovery, but they asked to call back on Tuesday.

[dakiwi]

one think you could try to get your data off the faulty drive is to buy the exact same model again if you can get it and take (from the new drive) the controller board and fit it onto the older drive and if the BIOS on the old drives controller card is what's at fault you should be able to get your data off

sorry if someone's posted this info earlier in the thread already

[lavan]

dakiwi, on Jan 18 2009, 12:59 PM, said:

one think you could try to get your data off the faulty drive is to buy the exact same model again if you can get it and take (from the new drive) the controller board and fit it onto the older drive and if the BIOS on the old drives controller card is what's at fault you should be able to get your data off

sorry if someone's posted this info earlier in the thread already

It doesn't work at all!!!

This post has been edited by lavan: 18 January 2009 - 04:11 AM

[eli2k]

lavan, on Jan 18 2009, 01:38 AM, said:

I called to them, they confirmed free data recovery, but they asked to call back on Tuesday.

Just wondering, were you escalated to one of the supervisors to find out that information?

[caba212]

it finally seems that seagate is s*****g in their pants, good for them

my issue is that using their online serial number checker it says that my drive is not affected how can that be? a

anybody else got the same response?

[Jackie78]

meihong, on Jan 17 2009, 11:08 PM, said:

Jackie78, on Jan 17 2009, 11:15 AM, said:

I have an ST31500341AS, Firmware CC1H, is it affected or not?

seagate support says not yet affected, whatever that means

Thanks alot, so we will wait and see what ahppens, has anybody got an answer to their support email yet?
Btw, what's the difference between CC1H and SD1A? As far as I know, they are not interchangeable, so what's the difference between the hardware?

Since there is an online serial checking tool available from Seagate, I have started a new thread in order to compare which drives may be affected:
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=128793

This post has been edited by Jackie78: 18 January 2009 - 06:16 AM

[cdturri]

Covered in Computerworld now: http://www.computerworld.com/action/articl...ticleId=9126280

And link to the online serial tool checker:

http://support.seaga...om/sncheck.html

Mine are Model: ST31500341AS P/N: 9JU138 - 300 Firmware: SD17 and it says they are not affected. I think this refers to the 0GB / gone from the BIOS bug, not the freezeing on RAID configurations which I guess is fixed by the previous firmware update (SD1A).

[cdturri]

Seagate does not allow users to download firmware updates becuase they could mess it up? LIARS!!! Look at this link:

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...000dd04090aRCRD

[Jackie78]

Is it me, or is that serial checking tool crap? Or are the users telling crap? If I look at this thread:

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...mp

And enter some of the fully readable serial numbers of people whose drives have already failed to the seagate online checking tool, it keeps telling me that these drives are NOT affected.

What now?

This post has been edited by Jackie78: 18 January 2009 - 06:31 AM

[cdturri]

I think it's pretty clear that Seagate doesn't know the full extend of the problem or don't want to go public with it. The KB page says that the defective drives were manufactured in Dec 2008 but clearly there are lots of people who had their ST31500341AS failing as early as Oct 2008.