Seagate fix breaks Barracuda.

The storage gaint Seagate has recieved lots of complaints following firmware update that made many 500GB hard drives in its Barracuda 7200.11 range completely stopped working.

Seagate customers used  official forums for raising their compaints towards firmware update that put their harddisk under trouble. Forum thread that was spanning more than 20 pages talks only about this issue.

The update was supposed to solve a problem in which some drives froze during certain I/O data transfers, causing applications to hang or in some cases causing the drive to fail completely.

Some of the feeling expressed by the Seagate customers are,

“This is CRAZY. I’ve never dealt with something like this. I have most of my vital data backed up, but seriously this is just nuts,” he said.

“I can’t believe I flashed a working drive with a second firmware to fix a critical bug in the original firmware only to brick it. Now I’m waiting on a third firmware to fix the second firmware that was supposed to fix the 1st firmware. This is like a techie’s nightmare. All of us surrounded by data that we can’t access due to faulty firmware.”

Most of the post in the thread says, that the firmware update went on fine without causing any problem. But when the machine gets rebooted, motherboard is not able to detect the hard drive.

Seagate has responded to this issue, saying that it is trying to solve the issue and the updated firmware will be made available within 24 hours. Moreover, the data in the hard drive will not be affected and it can be recovered without any trouble.