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Seagate hard drives from the Barracuda 7200.11, DiamondMax 22, Barracuda ES.2 SATA, and SV35 families, Seagate FreeAgent® , and Maxtor OneTouch® 4 may become inaccessible when the host system is powered on.  In other words, they turn into bricks.  If you are unfortunate to have one of these products and have not upgraded the firmware (i.e. if you are unfortunate enough to have one of these products and don’t cruise the Seagate support site on a regular basis), then a firmware bug will instruct the disk to turn itself into a brick some day when you power it up.  Do NOT power off any computer that has the following disk drives until you check the firmware.  Seagate is quietly offering free disaster recovery assistance, firmware updates, and software to determine if you have a disk that is running the evil firmware.  This “boot-of-death” bug rivals the infamous IBM Deathstar which lead to a successful class-action lawsuit.(Below is ver-batum from the Seagate support site, along with live links).

Once a drive has become affected the data becomes inaccessible to users but the data is not deleted.  Seagate has isolated this issue to a firmware bug affecting drives from these families manufactured in December 2008. Please use the following tools and instructions to determine if you have one of the affected products. If you do, we recommend that you update the firmware on the disk drive to prevent this condition:

Click here for instructions on how to find the serial number on your drive.  Click here to use the online serial number validation tool to check whether your drive requires a firmware update or not.
Important Note: When typing in your serial number into the validation tool, make sure to use ALL CAPS. Using lower case characters will invalidate the result.

If the online serial number validation tool states that your drive is affected, we recommend that you contact Seagate Customer Support for a firmware update to your hard drive.  You can expedite assistance by contacting Seagate via email. Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond to your email request with appropriate instructions.

To retrieve the model number, serial number and firmware revision there are multiple methods:  Seagate DriveDetect.exe method (recommended)

Click here to download Drive Detect:

When running Drive Detect you will see a screen like this. Look for the drives that are attached:

drive detect screenshot

In the example above the Drive Name is the same as the Model: ST31500341AS, the serial number is 9VS00J20 and the firmware revision is SD1A.

Device Manager Method :

Use Microsoft Windows Device Manager to see the model numbers of you disk drive.
- Choose Start | Run | type: devmgmt.msc
- Click Ok.
- Expand the Disk Drive branch to see the model numbers:

Seatools for Windows Method:
Download SeaTools for Windows which displays all of the required information.

You can also contact Seagate Support via phone at 1-800-SEAGATE. Please be prepared to give the serial number of your drive as the solution depends on providing the exact serial number.

For a list of international telephone numbers to Seagate Support and alternative methods of contact, please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

The following are potentially affected models. It is important however to use the online serial number validation tool to verify whether or not your specific drive is affected as not all drives of the same model necessarily share the same firmware revision.
Important Note: When typing in your serial number into the validation tool, make sure to use ALL CAPS. Using lower case characters will invalidate the result.

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Editor’s Note:  Seagate’s firmware update program is limited to Windows-based and MS-DOS based PCs.   Once I get the update, I will test with SMARTMon-UX software to see if it can be used to update firmware on Solaris, AIX, LINUX, etc …

boot-of-death, Failure analysis, Firmware