Hello,

I just bought a Seagate 500GB SATA 7200.11 hard drive and I have a strange issue with it.

I know about the 0LBA and BSY issues that occur with these drives and I have the tools to fix it.

I'm just reluctant to try, because : the HDD spins up fine, it is detected in BIOS with full name and sectors/capacity/speed but the moment that the system exits POST and starts booting, the HDD is no longer seen by the system.

HDAT2, MHDD, Seagate SeaTools for windows/DOS do not see the drive connected.

The drive is seen in BIOS, regardless if it is set with jumper to limit for 1.5Gbps SATA or the BIOS is set to IDE/RAID/AHCI mode. It just doesn't show up in any utilities/windows device manager/local disk manager or any other hard drive utility out there. Not even Seagate's Detect Drive.exe

The hard drive firmware is DE12 and I know it needs to be updated.

The question is : should I try to update it's firmware as if it were in BSY state? or would this destroy the drive's firmware? I know that drives in the BSY state spin down after a minute or so but this one remains spun up and is detected in BIOS (until boot) so I'm having doubts about this.

Do you ONLY know how to apply the famous fixes using the specific commands via hyperteminal or something? Or do you know more in terms in terms of commands for F3 drives?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

Hello labtech and thank you for your answer.

Unfortunately, I only know stuff from the guides (so yes, via Hyperterminal), I don't know much more about service commands for these Seagate drives.

I only have that RS232-to-USB adapter that I got by chopping up an old Nokia DKU-5 (CA-52) data cable which was within my budget as I have bought the drive as defective and I am attempting to fix it.

I am asking because there are some inconsistencies in your description OR accidental omitted info that makes things confusing.

Your statement: "I know that drives in the BSY state spin down after a minute or so but this one remains spun up and is detected in BIOS (until boot) so I'm having doubts about this."

This is not quite true.

If the drive spins down, then this is likely an internal hardware failure of some sort.

To move forward we need a terminal output posted here, please!

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

What I meant to say is that the previous drives that I had and suffered from the BSY state, spun down after about a minute and needed the terminal commands to spin back up.

I'm not sure if that's the case with all or most drives in the .11 series but I was saying that based on my past experiences, that's why I didn't want to risk trying to update the firmware of the drive using one of the guides.

What commands do I need to enter in the terminal to get an output? I'm asking this (besides being a n00b) so I can write it down as I do not have an internet connection at home right now.

No command needed.

Just power the drive on with the terminal attached to the drive.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

@labtech : I managed to rescue the drive, it was the BSY bug after all.

But two new problems came with it :

1. The drive continuously self-tests (itself ) and the SMART health keeps dropping because, it says, that there are weak, bad an uncorrectable sectors on the drive. The health dropped from 23 to 2% in a matter of hours without me doing anything to the drive. The drive is not partitioned and nothing was done to it except rescue with the RS232-to-USB controller.

2. The drive's firmware is DE12. Dell's support states that my drive's serial number does not need updating because it is not affected by the .11 firmware bugs (when I just rescued it because of a .11 firmware bug) and the Seagate Firmware Update program does not want to update my drive, it just goes into it's mini-Linux GRUB based loader, sees my drive and just restarts the PC without doing anything to it.

The BSY bug was triggered by something else, which is typically a degrading drive with bad sectors.

Why did you buy this drive in this conditon?

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I bought it at half the price of a 100% good drive of the same capacity. Thinking that I have the tools to fix it and would double my investment, I bought it. But for it to act like this and not update its firmware is...dubious.

Although I have never done the kind of repair work that you guys do, I have a couple of good years experience with HDDs and I have never encountered a drive that continuously develops bad sectors without any partition or data on it or without any program trying to READ/WRITE on the drive...

IF the drive has REALLY toasted heads it is a lost cause , otherwise the problem is fixable.

Unfortunately it requires MUCH MORE than a USB RS232 adapter and some info found here and there....

Try to zero fill the entire drive.

If you encounter a pattern of bad sectors at consistent intervals, then the drive is likely to have damaged head(s).

Hopefully, there will not be any additional firmware related issues.

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Hard Disk Drive (HDD), Solid State Drive (SSD, SATA, NVMe, etc), USB Flash Drive and RAID Data Recovery Specialist in Massachusetts

I did zero fill the drive using Seagate's SeaTools for DOS to make sure there is no "outside" interference.

The thing is, while the drive is left to its own devices, it's health drops and it gets louder and louder with every sector that it thinks it marks as BAD or defective or weak. But once I started to zero fill the drive, the noise got softer and softer, as you would expect from a somewhat modern drive, to be quiet. Also, the health jumped back up.

But as soon as I enter windows, the health drops back. I've just ordered a new HDD controller to help with this process. I'm going to put it in a test loop or do the insane thing and regenerate every sector on the drive, which I'm guessing would take about 3 months.

P.S. : I needed another HDD controller because I only have the on-board option and whenever there is a problem with a HDD(HDD Regenerator found a bad sector), the whole system locks up

Well, this is weird...

I mounted the second SATA controller and connected the HDD to my PC. Sure enough, when scanning for bad sectors the system didn't hang.

But now, there's another issue : before I bought the second SATA controller, the drive had many BAD sectors that would not regenerate (I thought they were surface defects) but now it regenerates every sector found, within the exact same range as before.

What could have happened to the drive while it was offline, waiting for the new controller? Is this normal? I've never had a drive which presented itself in such a..."unique" way before )