[tlug] Seagate Firmware Bug.

[Edward Middleton <emiddleton@example.com>]

Recently I have been recommending people to use Seagate drives because I
have found them to be pretty reliable.

It is probably not news to anyone, but in case you hadn't heard, a
number of Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA, and DiamondMax 22 Drives have a
firmware bugs which can cause them to stop booting[1] permanently.

There is a web page[2] that you can check whether your drive is
effected.  You can get the model and serial number using smartctl i.e.

# smartctl -a /dev/sda | head

It appears that Seagate confounded their initial mistake by releasing a
firmware upgrade iso which didn't adequately check what firmware was
installed on the drive and whether the updated firmware would actually
boot.  I presume they have resolved this issue, but I would advise you
to backup all data if you intend to update your firmware.  I have an
effected drive in my RAID1 array on my server so I will tell you how the
upgrade goes.

Cheers,

Edward

1. http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1098793&cid=26542735
2. http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931