Seagate Hard Drive Brick Fix for 7200.11, ES.2 - Possibly

It looks like someone knows a little about the inner workings of Seagate hard drives.

They have posted a series of fix steps for Seagate hard drives that have seemingly bricked themselves because of bad firmware:

• MSFN Forums: The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs (final and revised version)
• MSFN Forums: The Solution for Seagate 7200.11 HDDs

There are two separate reasons for the bricking of the drive with a specific methodology to deal with each reason. Keep this in mind. One of the methodologies requires the daughter board to be swapped while powered up leaving lots of room for frying it.

We have used a daughter board swap method to recover data on hard drives in the past. Though there was no power applied.

In this case, we are talking about connecting to the hard drive's underlying firmware structures via an RS232 based terminal session and working with the base level commands to bring the drive back to life.

This methodology is not for the feint of heart. This bears repeating: This methodology is not for the feint of heart.

This particular person has been kind enough to share the fix methodology, so if it is needed then handle with care.

Philip Elder
MPECS Inc.
Microsoft Small Business Specialists

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