Seagate Hard Drive Firmware Issue

By on January 17, 2009 in Hardware, Windows Home Server

If your home server is running with Seagate drives, then make sure you check out this knowledge base article regarding a serious firmware bug with the following drives:

  • Barracuda 7200.11
  • DiamondMax 22
  • Barracuda ES.2 SATA
  • SV35

If you’re affected, contact Seagate and they’ll provide instructions to resolve the issue.

More Info: Seagate


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About Terry Walsh

Terry Walsh is the founding editor and owner of We Got Served. Since February 2007, the site has provided detailed coverage and analysis of the emerging home server category, and has subsequently grown into a trusted outlet for digital home news and reviews.
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  • Ernie Tirado

    Terry, thanks again. I have two drives which I installed in my HP WHS and seem to be working fine. Question is is do I really need to update the firmware…even Seagate’s website says it is extreamly risky. I just don’t need the troble since I am getting over screwing up my server. All I need to do is trash my 2 1tb drives.
    Cheers.

  • Zeus

    Thanks for the post. I saw this from another blog.

    In fact, I just custom built a WHS… which drives did I use for data?

    Of course, 2-1TB Seagate Barracuda’s… I’ve submitted my case to Seagate, and I’m awaiting an e-mail from their tech support.

  • Paul

    Seems like the issue is isolated to those drives manufactured in December 2008. Whew.

  • merdzd

    @Paul – +1
    i have ST3500641AS..
    start get the Stop error 0×077
    event ID7 :
    “he device, \Device\Harddisk2, has a bad block.”
    can i just remove from storage?
    i got 700Gb free space.
    and yes i have 1 year in my WHS no problem until now.
    how can i be sure \Device\Harddisk2 its

    HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\HARDWARE\DEVICEMAP\SCSI\SCSI PORT 2\SCSI BUS 0\TARGET ID 0\LOGICAL UNIT ID “ST3500641AS”

    soo Scsi Port 2 it`s = \Device\Harddisk2
    is it correct?

  • Ernie Tirado

    How do you know when your drive was built?
    Would like the peace of mind.
    Ernie

  • http://www.sygyzy.com sygyzy

    I brought this up in the forums and nobody seems to be addressing it. All the WHS experts are convinced that for all intents and purposes, the WHS is “just another PC.” Well please go to the Seagate support page and download DriveDetect or SeaTools and tell me what it displays for you. For me, DD doesn’t detect my EX470 system drive nor my 2 Seagate 1TB Barracudas. SeaTools does find it, but then the tool hangs. It cannot run any tests on it.

    How are we supposed to run firmware updates on this thing?

  • AndyR

    I’m fairly new to the HP MediaSmart, but have the original 500Gb drive & and additional 1Tb drive, both are Seagate Barracuda 7200.11

    Can anyone advise how to identify what firmware version thwey are running?? I assume that I need to remote into the server, and guess if I do a search here I will find instructions on how to do that correctly (and safely)

    Any help would be appreciated.

  • Bert Wise

    I would also like to know how to identify the firmware version on the HP MSS. I can log onto the server and access Seagate’s web site but the page with the instructions won’t fully load so I can’t get at the program they posted that identifies the drives and firmware versions.

    The page loads fine on my computer but not when I remote into the server.

  • Mal

    Seagate have a program called drivedetect which you can run and it will show you a list of your drives with version of firmware etc, go to http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207957

  • Anthony

    I have four ST31000340AS (1TBx4) drives in my MSS. I had two drives that were effected by the known issue. Seagate must be getting slammed as you can’t reach their tech support lines and I submitted an email over two weeks ago without a response. On Monday, Jan 19th, they released untested firmware updates and they shut their download down for flash validation. Now they released a new version that still didn’t work correctly. I had to manually run the flash instead of using their batch file which worked. Both effected drives are SD1A now. As for testing the drives within the MSS, fat chance. The the Seagate software and MSS hard disk controller wont enumerate the drives traditionally so you’ll have to attach your Seagate(s) to a desktop computer for testing (non-RAID controller). Really it’s not all that hard, pull your drive and look at the label. I highly recommend backing up your data before flashing so that you don’t risk data loss, I lost nothing but that doesn’t mean anything.

    As for updating the drives create a DOS boot disk(CDROM/Floppy/USB Key). Next create Seagates flash CD (you can also extract the content of the boot sector from the ISO file which has what you need, use WinISO, MagicISO, etc.)

    The key files that you’ll need are:
    fdl462b.exe
    *.lod (this may change based on the drive that you have)

    from DOS I ran the following command
    (FlashProg) (model) ( firmware ) ( model ) ( options )
    FDL462B.EXE -m MOOSE -f SD1A3D4D.LOD -i ST31000340AS -s -x -b -v -a 20
    The above is specific to the ST31000340AS drive only! You can open flash.bat to read it’s specifics for your drive.

    again always you caution. it could kill your drive, but Seagate states they’ll offer data recovery for free on this issue.

  • Martijn

    I had 3 wrong drives. (3 out of 5…) The new firmware update worked fine. The instructions where quite clear on what you have to do but… READ THEM!!!!

    I actually did someting stupid… I still had the other drives connected when I updated the first one… (how stupid can you be…) But lucky me… no data loss here!

    Good luck

    BTW the new firmware is SD1A

  • R

    Where can I found the new firmware for STM31000340AS. I could not find it om the seagate web.

  • Colin

    Not sure if anyone can help but my PC doesn't identify my Maxtor HD and I need to somehow run a firmware update on it. I can send it in but would prefer not to if at all possible. Any ideas?

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