Skip to main content

Seagate F3 Series of Drives

Seagate Data Recovery


Back in 2008 Seagate introduced the 7200.11 F3 series of drives, the range was from 160 GB up to 1500 GB and later 2 GB.

Soon after, these drives developed a firmware bug that totally bricked the hard disks. Seagate forums were overflowing with tales of woe.

Seagate brought out a firmware update that fixed the problem, but the drive needed to be working to apply it. There was another problem, the firmware fix actually bricked working drives - but only a specific model was affected with the update.

Seagate were then forced to provide free data recovery on this model, but left the rest to their own devices.

At one point someone made some termminal commands available that could fix the SMART logs and translator problem that cause the 0 MB problems on some of the drives so then they could then run the firmware update. Thanks to that guy many users were able to recover their data.

When Seagate bought out the 7200.12 and some later Laptop versions, there was another firmware module that was linked to the translator. The Non Resident G-List (NRG-List). The fix for the 7200.11 actually overwrote this module, however, this module was critical and so the fix actually made the problem worse, significantly so.

Along with members of the Global Data Recovery Alliance We developed techniques to avoid damaging the NRG List whilst still repairing the translator. We even developed a method to rebuild a missing NRG List, but this took some time and manual entry directly into the FW of the drive. Since those days the process has been fully automated and a rebuild can be done considerably quicker.

Because Seagates 'secret' terminal commands had become known to anyone that can search the internet, they looked at ways of locking the terminal from end users.

So far we have cracked 2 of these methods that affect the 7200.14, Lombard and later Grenada drives the latter require a ROM patch in order to gain access but again it is a first for the Global Data Recovery Alliance and MjM Data Recovery Ltd

Seagate Data Recovery

Comments

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment on this data recovery blog

Popular posts from this blog

Slow Reponding Toshiba Drives

Toshiba Laptop Data Recovery Some problems have been found with Toshiba Laptop drives where the computer will fail with any of the following symptoms .. The drive hangs during boot Unable to access data Computer is very slow Problem with Drives We found the problem which is related to the G-List ( Grown defect list )it either becomes corrupt or is not readable. If it is not readable by the drive then the correct translator algorithms can not be run and so the drive slows down or even stops completely. Solution to Toshiba Hard Disk Problem. The solution is very complex and requires specialist equipment to enable rebuilding of the defect maps externally to the drive. However, once this is achieved the data can be accessed and a near perfect recovery is possible. For more information on this problem please visit our Toshiba Data Recovery pages.
Post a Comment
Read more

Hard Disk Recovery

Data recovery from hard disk drives is one of the most technically advanced operations performed by computer data recovery engineers. Much of the work involves highly skilled engineers that have engineering knowledge of how a hard disk functions. Not only mechanically, but electronically and logically. There are many situations where an engineer will examine a hard disk then find it has to be completely disassembled and rebuilt with new parts to replace the worn parts. This involves opening the drive in a clean room environment. Some drives suffer from Firmware corruption so the engineer will need to know how the individual manufacturer (and in many cases specific model ranges) store the firmware on the drive. In most cases this area is not accessible to the end-user so specialist equipment is needed to access the firmware on hard disks. Also, a drive may be suffering from an electronics problem which will require specialist techniques as many modern hard disks use unique ROM co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fake Memory Cards

Fake Memory Cards. After seeing countless fake memory cards received for data recovery, we decided to write some software to help users determine if they have a fake memory or genuine memory card. The problem with the fakes is that they are so good, they actually appear to have the advertised storage space and it even seems that the full amount of data can be written. The only problem, is that the data overwrites some of the existing data rendering the older data useless. Our experiments indicate that (at least with the devices we tested) that the files and folder structures seem to be OK as they list as expected. The problem comes when the memory reaches its true physical limit. At that time, the data starts overwriting at the end of the card. As the file system information is updated, as normal there is no way of knowing, until you open a file that has been overwritten. It has gone, and unfortunately is most likely not recoverable.  Of course there will be exceptions to thi...
Post a Comment
Read more