Success story with Seagate warranty
Posted by Aapo Rantalainen on April 15, 2010
One day my tabletop computer use more time to boot than normal. And then this happens again and again. I haven’t time to check what was wrong until I realized one hard disk was not mounted. And actually there was not even /dev for it.
I boot to BIOS menu and drive was not recognized at all. It has never say any SMART warnings or errors. So what I could do with operating system level if BIOS is not recognizing it? I opened the case of computer and tested it with another cables, nothing. I made web-search about it model and something ‘BIOS not recognized disk’. And I found something very interesting. There were bug in firmware of hard disk causing it self-bricking after some hundreds boots. First Seagate had said that error can’t be their fault. Luckily this phenomena has started over year ago and today they have free data recovery for faulty firmware bricking.
I sent post to Seagate support with my serial number. They confirmed that I have one of affected disk. Next day courier come and took my disk. Then I got confirmation my disk has arrived to Amsterdam (Seagates factory). And after couple of days courier brought hard disk back to me. It is now working, with updated firmware and all my data inside. And cost to to me was nothing.
If you have Seagate Barracuda:
A) Make firmware update now (it can be done with LIVE-cd if disk is not bricked)
B) Reboot it many times until it bricks and then send it trip to Amsterdam
I still have one question: Why I’m so surprised that warranty works?
More reading: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1050374/seagate-barracudas-7200-11-failing
