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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

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