I have Seagate HDD model : ST3500620AS, SN: 9QM3NSQZ with curent firmware FW: DE13. The drive curently has no OS, and i dont have any important data on it. The problem is, when i try to format or operate, run SeaTools to test it in most cases it stops working. If i just "warm" reset pc the HDD no longer recognized and I need to perform "cold" boot after which its again listed in bios.
At all time when it's detected it reports accurate size of 500Gb. I cant apply Seagate FW or any (all corresponding to this model.) other except Dell's FW DE13.

I'm little confused about the firmware version because on the HDD casing it states that original Firmware is LC11 ! Other than this SN and Model match using SeaTools utility. Tools show that Drive is Security Freeze locked and SMART has not been tripped.

Do you have any sugestions?

My Google research suggests that LC11 is a Lacie OEM firmware. I also see references to LC15.

Perhaps you could contact Lacie for an explanation:
http://www.lacie.com/support/

I think Dell's fix for the 7200.11 bricking bug was DE13, so it looks like Lacie OEM firmware has been replaced with Dell's.

I'd look at a SMART report with a utility such as HD Sentinel for DOS, or HDAT2. Expect to see reallocated sectors.

If it has no data then my suggestion would be to RMA it.

_________________
You don't have to backup all of your files, just the ones you want to keep.

I would have expected that an OEM HD would not be covered by a Seagate warranty, but it appears that it is.

http://support.seagate.com/customer/war ... dation.jsp

Serial Number 9QM3NSQZ
Seagate Part Number 9BX144-100
Warranty Status In Warranty
Expiration 03-Jun-2013
Options Exchange

OEM drives indicate "Contact Place of Purchase" in the Options column, and "Component" for Warranty Status.

I would like to thank You for suggestions!

Here are logs from HDAT2. I put them in separate files so it can be viewed easy.

I would point that some of the suspicious parts are :

1)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Log Directory (00h) [ST3500620AS]
*******************************************************************************
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Logging version: 1
Data checksum : BAD [reported 00h, should be E8h]
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2)
*******************************************************************************
Read Capability [ST3500620AS]
*******************************************************************************
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Data revision: 000Ah
Data checksum: OK [reported C6h, should be C6h]
ÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄÄ
Self-Test Execution status
-> Completed (read test element failed) <-----------------------
-> Percent Self-Test Remaining: 90%
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

3) Lines 198 and 199 in SMARTreadAtributeData were marked as yellow (error)

4) .... and so on....


I'm not quite sure what this means regarding to read errors mentioned, there is no crackling noise or any unusual sounds from the HDD... I'm gonna try again with seagate tools to see what info will they provide.

If needed i can provide all additional Info if needed.

If u have suggestions or doubt, please write. T Y

Ok this is a small update...

The HDD stops responding always when i do surface test or full format! Other case when he stops is when i use HDDregenerator , if its fresh boot up HDDregen usualy shows about 200k valid sectors (tested all over the drive) and than he stops a bit and starts showing bad secrtors. (drive is not recognised any more and i need to Power off - Power on the Pc)

All those things you've pointed out are of concern, at least to me. If you use SeaTools to perform a "zero fill", I expect that the "pending" sectors will either be remapped (reallocated) or returned to service. In any case I'd RMA your drive, as suggested elsewhere.

I notice that the SMART report produced by HD Sentinel differs from HDAT2 in that it has an additional entry at the end. I expect that this may be an artifact of the switch from LC11 firmware to DE13. Perhaps LC11 had an extra attribute??? When DE13 overwrote the SMART data block, perhaps it placed a 00 byte at the last position and in so doing zeroed out LC11's last attribute ID???

This begs the question, what else is different about DE13?

BTW, the reason you can't "flash" retail firmware is that Seagate's SeaFlash utility compares your drive's model and firmware version against a configuration file. If you want to forcibly flash the firmware of your choice, you may be able to do so by editing the flash.bat file to eliminate this check. However, the advice I have received in this forum is not to mix retail and OEM firmwares.

If you would like to try, then point me to the firmware of your choice and I'll show you how to go about it.

BTW, here are the instructions for SeaFlash:
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/sf_usage.txt

Notice this option:

-w SMART Clear Logs.

Yes i'm willing to experiment. I think i wanna try the co-responding seagate FW MooseDT-SD1A-2D-8-16-32MB.iso for this model of HDD. Reason is RMA cost of shipping will be high because i have to send the HDD over 2k km away to nearest seagate collection point (none here in my country).

About the seagate tools, "zero fill" also results in error.... I divided disk in 6 partitions and wanted to see where this errors occurs. Surface check failed, on all of them. I'm not sure what to think, is it from the FW or maby damaged heads...

I'm going to read carefully you're link and try to flash it with MooseDT-SD1A-2D-8-16-32MB.iso, and i will consult u for further steps.

Thanks

And again feel free to point any suggestions. This HDD is ether going to work or become fancy ash tray / mirror set.

AIUI, part of the firmware is written to the platters. If the drive has problems with the heads, then you may brick it.

As for my link, it's not very helpful on its own.

Download the CD ISO and use Isobuster to extra the BootImage.img file. This is a 1.44MB floppy diskette image.

Then use WinImage to extract the FreeDOS files and the ZIP file containing the firmware.

The ZIP contains a LOD firmware image, a TXS configuration file, a flash executable (eg sf.exe), and a flash.bat batch file.

The line that does the flashing is the following:

sf -m MOOSE -f -s -x -b -v -a 10 -h sn16bcfg.txs

I suspect you will be able to remove the check by amending the line as follows:

sf -m MOOSE -f -s -x -b -v -a 10

If this doesn't work, then you may need to specify the .LOD file name with the -f switch.

I believe Dell's firmware upgrader has a working example.

I totally agree.

I spent whole day on google, trying to find LC11, all i got is more annoyance. It seems like this is phantom FW...

Hi again,
sorry it took me week to reply.
The news is i did replaced FW DE13 with FW SD1A. It all went well, no errors no need of additional switch (force).
Yet there is another problem now. After flashing the FW i did use "Zero Fill" option and it went ok, "Longt test" (SeaTools) reported bad sectors and it was able to correct them (it didnt freeze the HDD like before!).

But after i did cold boot bios reported SMART error, SeaTools reported that "SMART has been tripped" !
The HDD does not freeze any more on surface check (tho it reports almost all of sectors i randomly checked to be bad, HddRegenerator reported them too). The bios reports the correct HDD size. Before i try to run full new "Zero fill" and "Long test" i would appreciate on any suggestion on SMART reporting error "SMART has been tripped"... Will it go away if i do repair bad sectors ?

Any suggestion is welcomed:) Thanks !

"Repairing" bad sectors involves taking them out of service and replacing them with good spares. Bad sectors that have been reallocated will remain that way, unless you clear the G-list, but this is not possible via ATA commands (unless there is a vendor specific command for this purpose). So, no, the "SMART has been tripped" problem will not go away.

I have a hunch that SMART was tripped because of reallocations.



Also, I have seen these LC11 firmware in my lab as well, from a Lacie big disk. Turns out one of the disks had LED:CC error, same error as SD15/HP24, etc have.

And i think i saw that in some SMART report, i'll look for it and upload

Any idea on what to do ?


p.s. It was a "dead man's switch".... it had to go off at some point.

You have 2047 bad sectors which have been successfully reallocated. They are the reason for your SMART failure. You should backup your data and replace the drive.

Attribute 0xBB is indicating 186 "Reported Uncorrectable Errors".

Attribute 0xBC is indicating 13 Command Timeouts.

The latter's decimal value is 786445, or 0x000c000d in hex. I believe Command Timeouts is a multibyte attribute, and that the actual number of timeouts is 0x000d (=13).

BTW, it appears that HD Tune's author examines only the lower 32 bits of each 48-bit attribute. Perhaps s/he is not aware of the existence of the upper 16 bits.

The meanings of each attribute are discussed in the following article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.M.A.R.T. ... attributes