Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

ReFS (Resiliant File System) Data Recovery

MS ReFS (Resiliant File System) Data Recovery Microsoft introduced their Resilient File System (ReFS) with Windows Server 2012. It is a 'self repairing' file system that detects errors and rebuilds data. MjM Data Recovery are now able to recover data from this file system from single drive servers  to multi drive raid systems . Please visit our main website for details of our Data Recovery Services .

Laptop Data Recovery

A large number of computers sold are laptop computers. They are light and portable. Modern laptops contain very large hard disks at the time of writing this article 500Gb are often seen here for data recovery. One of the most common problems we see are drives where the heads have crashed. The main cause is actually part of the design of the computer - remember the bit where I said 'they are light and portable'? It is easy to put the computer on your lap, then when you need to get up, lift the computer up and put it to one side. This movement can cause a head crash especially if the heads are reading or writing at the time. Most manuals that we have seen recommend putting the computer on a firm surface like a desk or a table and in fact NOT putting it on your lap - strange that they are called 'laptops' when it is not recommended to use them as such. Some manufacturers have developed hardware that detects when the computer is being moved and pulls the heads to a saf...

Raid Recovery

Raid recovery is a specialist type of data recovery service. RAID is an acronym of R edundant A rray of I nexpensive D rives and consists of at least two drives that are configured as a single volume or container. The most common forms of RAID are described below. RAID 0 requires a minimum of two drives that gives the full disk size of both drives as a single volume the data is stored in stripes each stripe consisting of a block of data on each drive block sizes are typically 64kb but we have block sizes from 4kb to 2 Mb in size. This is the cheapest type of RAID but has no redundancy. If one drive fails, then access to all data on both drives is lost. RAID 1 Requires 2 drives the second drive is an identical copy of the first drive meaning that you only get the equivalent of one drive for the price of two. Expensive but offers redundancy so one drive can fail and you can still access the data on the second drive. RAID 5 Requires a minimum of three drives. Is similar to RAID 0 in...