Small story about how I got these drives:

So I had a Samsung drive that wouldn't spin, and it turned out to be a firmware bug that causes the G-List to get corrupted, wiping it out fixed the issue and let me recover the whole drive. I loved how it felt to be able to do something off a previously dead HDD without even opening it up, that's how I wanted data recovery to be on my list of "things that I know how to do".

Instead of going through the bad path, I decided to do things the right way, so instead of experimenting with customers' drives, I bought 8 damaged HDDs with all sorts of different issues. This time, I'm dealing with this Seagate ST3250138AS whose S/N is 5VMEWHD8, and the label states that it came with FW version HP35. It has a known firmware issue where even though it kinda works, over time, it gets super slow, slow enough even for trying to read it for DR, even disabling most features doesn't help.

I did find a firmware for this model identified as CC49 (https://www.seagate.com/staticfiles/support/downloads/firmware/Barracuda12-ALL-CC49.exe), although trying to install it, reports that the drive is not compatible. I also tried downloading http://support.seagate.com/kbimg/utils/drivedetect.exe which gets the drive picked up but, going to the firmware download page, reports that this drive doesn't have any available. Seagate's own FAQ states that this could be because of the drive being an OEM version and, as such, I'd need to reach whatever company that requested it to be manufactured, the fun thing is that I have no way of doing so, since there's no information about it online, or perhaps I don't know how to search for it. Whatever the case is, I hope you can give me a hand on this once, since I'd like to play around with them.

Just for clarification, I did already try clearing the G-List and moving real defects to P-List (this procedure http://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?f=83&t=552), although this latter media scan displayed a lot of unrecoverable media errors, the fun thing is that those bad sectors that software like Victoria or HDTune report do actually change at random if I wipe the G-List, so I assume that it's either a weak heads issue or a firmware bug not properly adjusting the translator as time passes by.

Thank you all in advance!