Seagate bug fix bricks Barracudas

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 21 Jan 2009 at 08:49

Seagate's attempts to fix a firmware glitch in its hard drives has resulted in hundreds of users reporting that the patch has brought their drives screeching to a halt.

The fix was meant to resolve an issue affecting the company's Barracuda 7200.11 and "related drive families", but appears to have further exacerbated the problem with Seagate's support forums filling with people complaining that their 500GB Barracudas have stopped working.

"Please add me to the list of people with 500GB drives this firmware bricked. The flash said it went okay. The bios can still see the drive but no software can. When I run PMagic (Gparted), it spams me with device errors and says it doesn't detect any drives," notes one poster.

"This is outrageous!" Says another angry poster. "My drive is screwed too. I'm really angry about this. I followed the instructions to the letter and triple checked my model/serial/firmware to make sure I really needed this. I applied the darn update and now my hard drive doesn't work. Give me back my old firmware."

Seagate has now pulled the update "pending validation".

The company was not available for comment at the time of publication.