I’m a little concerned that my harddrives (all of them Seagate ST3500320AS, FW SD15) will fail…..

Heise

Seagate Knowledgebase

I contacted Seagate’s technical support and just hope they’ll release the firmware soon. They didn’t treat their customers nicely in the forums, at least at the beginning of the series of failures. I’ll wait and see.

Update: Seagate is now offering a serial check (see the knowledgebase article I linked above) to see whether a drive is affected. Both my drives, of course, ARE affected. Nothing heard from Seagate Support yet.)

Update 2: Seagate has now (after some downtime of the knowledgebase) published the firmware Updates. For the drive listed above you can find the update HERE.

Update 3: Looks like they now know a bit more precisely which drives are affected and which are not, because my harddisks appear to be no longer affected by the issue.

Update 4: Wrong again, my drives ARE affected, only the firmware flash programme (bootable) Seagate provides doesn’t recognize them correctly. (Still no word from Seagate about it, getting through live-chat-support seems currently impossible.)

Update 5: I actually got through support chat. (After quite a while). What happened was what I expected because the knowledgebase has been down for approx. half an hour now.

Hello. How may I help you?
Me: hi
Me: can you confirm that my drive is affected by the current firmware bug? And if so, why am I not able to flash the new firmware onto it?
Me: the flash programme tells me that no matching drives were found
Supporter.: Just a moment
Me: Thanks.
Me: Current firmware revision is SD15 by the way
Me: found something?
Supporter.: not yet
Supporter.: I am not able to confirm that the drive is involved in the firmware issue. Our access to the system checker in down for some reason, and I am unable to check the serial.
Me: Okay, I’ll check back with you
Me: thanks anyway

Update 6: Seagate has taken the firmware update offline.

Note: This file has been temporarily taken offline as of Jan 19, 2008 8PM CST for validation.

This appears to be a second firmware update (if I’m reading the seagate forum entries correctly, I just had a quick look at them). As I understand, Seagate published one firmware update, and people experienced similar errors as I did, i.e. the update programme just didn’t flash the drive. Then, it appears there has been another update [at least for some drive models] they published afterwards, which actually did flash the drive. But the drives weren’t accessible with that new firmware on. I’d call that “semi-bricked” (i.e. not knowing whether another update will fix this) or something. And only after ALL THAT they took down the update again, which appears to be the state as of now.

Update 7: A new Firmware Update has been released (it’s still called SD1A for my drives, though) and it appears to be working. I just flashed both my drives (only one at a time of course) and they are working fine. In the Seagate Forums people are reporting formerly bricked drives to be working again. (I don’t know whether this only applies to drives bricked AFTER the earlier SD1A update or also for drives bricked due to the original bug in SD15 etc.)

I’ve read a lot about them already, and finally, I received my own Email charging me EUR 96. (YEY!)

Okay, the Emailaddress is missspelled (I get the Emails, though), the postal Address is totally absurd (considered the difference from my real address that is), and the IP that registered the account (or at least the one the bill claims did it) belongs to the pool of Versatel (says WHOIS).

But aside from that, hey, I got the Email. So I’m paying, right? ;)

What I find funny is that, before they billed me, I got another Email, telling me to please activate and verify my account by logging in with the given password. I didn’t. And yet, ‘my’ account appears to be activated. Or not? And of course, by registering at this website, you have to resign your right of withdrawal.

Of course I won’t pay, I won’t do anything. But I’ll post here if anything new happens. And I don’t have the time now, but I will also publish their Emails and bill here, soon.

[b]Update: [/b] I recently received another email demanding payment (now 99 eur, including a fee for reminding me ;) ) and threatening me that their lawyer will sue me if I don’t pay. How exciting :P
More to come, as soon as I find the time.

[b]Update: [/b] So.. after some time has passed I’m very sure I won’t hear from them again… I didn’t communicate to them at all, and that letter I talked about in the previous Update was the last I heard. So nothing to worry about.