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Seagate 7200.11 Hard Disk Drives

Known issues with these hard drives came to light mid 2008 when MjM Data Recovery started receiving drives that were displaying extraordinary symptoms. Either the drive would not show in the BIOS or if it did it would show has have 0 bytes capacity. We started work straight away and found the problem to be in logs in the factory area of the drive.

Data Recovery

We found a method of repairing the drives and started recovering data. Seagate were made aware of the problem and issued a fix in the form of a firmware update. However, the firmware fix would not work on drives that had already failed as the built-in operating system of the drive recognises there is a problem and sets the drive into 'failsafe' mode. So users that were aware of the problem could update their firmware and fix their drives as long as they had not already become affected with the problem.

The first firmware update actually made the problem worse with some drives. After applying the firmware update, the drives became in-operational. At this point, Seagate offered a free data recovery service for drives that had become bricked with the new firmware update and soon released a working version of the update which has improved the situation.

MjM Data Recovery were one of the the first companies in the UK to be able to recover from Seagate 7200.11 Firmware problems.


Because Seagate make hard disks for OEM (e.g. Dell, Hp, Maxtor, etc) the problem spread into those hard disks too ..

Drives that the Firmware problem has surfaced are:

ST31500641AS, ST31000333AS, ST3640323AS, ST3320613AS, ST320816AS, ST3160813AS STM31000334AS, STM340323AS, STM3320614AS, STM3160813AS, STM3500320AS
STM3750330AS, STM31000340AS , STM3500320ASm ST3500620AS, ST3500820AS
ST640330AS, ST640530AS, ST3750330AS, ST3750630AS, ST31000340AS, ST3750630AS, ST31000340AS

It has also effected the Video Server hard disk models ..
ST31000340SV, ST3750330SV, ST3500320SV, ST3320410SV

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