Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Problems
The eco-friendly 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB (ST31000340AS) is starting to fail its customers.
This afternoon, I received an IM from one of my college friends telling me about his awful experience with the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11.
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 is a 1.5 TB eco-friendly laptop storage device. It saves 43% of power without compromising drive and system performance, according to Seagate specifications. My friend says otherwise. Just last night, while working on his laptop, his Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 failed him.
According to my friend, after the hard disk failure, he tried rebooting his system but to no avail. His computer was not able to detect the hard drive. He tried fixing the problem using standard trouble shooting methods but it still didn’t work. All of his works, projects and other important files were gone in an instant because he trusted the brand that he thought would never fail him.
Apparently, my friend is not the only one who’s having this hard disk failure problem. A lot of Seagate customers are now complaining about the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB ST31000340AS Model after experiencing the same problems that my friend had. According to this report, the problem is caused by the faulty firmware code embedded within the hard disk which causes the head to rear during boot detection. The hard drive may work of a while but the next time you boot up, it will brick itself to death.
There are two common errors on Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Hard Drives; a 0 LBA error ( when your BIOS can recognize your HDD at POST moment, but as a 0MB drive ) and a BSY error ( when the HDD enters a halt state, or busy state, the HDD will not be recognized by the BIOS at POST moment ).
Seagate’s user forums have been receiving a lot of reports regarding these malfunctions. Seagate already issued a firmware update to fix the problem. Lucky for those who have not experienced the problem yet as their hard drives can still be saved. But for those whose hard drives are already bricked, the firmware update won’t work. The only work-around is to have the hard drive recovered with a data recovery service for a high price.
Alternate Solution (How to fix the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Detection Problem)
Aside from paying a high price for the data recovery service, one user from the Microsoft Software Forum Network suggests this solution. Though you can avoid paying for data recovery with this solution, the risk of losing the data and further damaging the disk is very high. You will also need several hardware tools for you to be able to correctly apply the procedure.
At any rate, I hope Seagate can come up with a better solution other than the firmware update they are giving, most especially to those customers whose hard drives are now as good as dead.
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About the Author
Techie Kid is a multi-niche blogger, photography enthusiast, WordCamp 2008 organizer, Philippine Blog Awards 2009 organizer, and Philippine Blog Awards 2008 Bloggers’ Choice Awardee.
August 24th, 2009 at 10:06 pm
thats a nasty one…brick itself to death..
thanks for the tip
Reply
August 24th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
waaahh… kawawa naman yung friend mo… sana maging cheaper na ang mga solid state driives…
Reply
Winston Reply:
August 24th, 2009 at 11:06 pm
that’s another story.
Reply
August 28th, 2010 at 6:11 pm
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