Hello,
a
Seagate Archive HDD ST8000AS0002 committed suicide as it seems :/
It is a
3.5" HDD with capacity of
8TB and was mounted in fixed 8-bay USB-housing as data archive.
It was only used once a month for data transfer, then completely powered off. The device was not moved since years.
No one else touched the device and no one else was using it.
Then one day last month, when the 8-bay USB-housing was powered on again, only this single drive was
completely death.
Because of that I
ruled out physical hardware damage. I removed defective drive from 8-bay housing and also completely identical other HDD with exact identical firmware and pcb. I then did
pcb board swap. That confirmed there was no physical damage - HDD was spinning up, also recognized by pc but reading of sectors failed because
firmware transfer was not done yet.
I used chinese usb-programmer with pogo-pins for
in-circuit firmware-dumping of patient's firmware including confirmation reading of firmware. I then applied it to donor pcb - result: not working, same as in beginning, no life sign at all. I then reversed the process and now again spin-up, but because of not matching firmware parameters the pc cannot read data. Also SMART not working.
I have only hex-editor and chinese usb-programmer as equipment. I did comparision of hex dumps and found out that in patient's firmware there are some modules missing. I ruled out corrupted or broken EEPROM because there are no artifacts of wrong data there. EEPROM is readable fine from beginning to end with plausible data-blocks everywhere. Also data seems plausible from hex-editor view.
There are just some modules missing!Why the f* did this Seagate HDD deleted it's own modules from EEPROM? It must have done it by itself. There was no external event.
What do you think? Is there a way to read-out my data? Maybe using PC-3000?
I bow down before the masterminds of this forum
In the patient's firmware there is data missing at the following offsets:
0x0EFFF8
0x180000
0x181870
0x181C90
0x182805
0x183013
0x195CB0
0x1974D0
0x1984F0
Attachment:
dump-brokendevice.zip [437.71 KiB]
Downloaded 224 times
Attachment:
dump-working-identical.zip [460.23 KiB]
Downloaded 222 times