I have NAS with 4 * ST31000333AS firmware SD05. Configured as RAID 5. Volumes are not accessible. I took disks out to clone and two are reported as size 32MB. What is this? Something to do with the cache size I suspect. I speak to Seagate and they tell me not firmware problem but Dynamic Drive Overlay (DDO) corrupt and need to perform mechanical recovery. They only interested in reseting the disks not assisting with getting the data off.

There is another part of Seagate that will help you

http://www.i365.com

Anyway, I think I'll disagree with that diagnosis. We normally don't use DDO on modern systems. It was a way for an older BIOS to access newer equipment. The problem for you is that RAID work is always very expensive. If you get them worked on individually and think you can rebuild the RAID yourself once the data is accessible again, the price may be lower, but not much if you get billed on per drive basis. The drives in question need to be diagnosed properly and not over the phone.

Good luck.

Seagate claims they will recover the content without charge for any 7200.11 with firmware issues. So far, they are batting .000 from what I have seen. They have denied any claim I've sent them so far (6) for one of my customers, claiming that the drive did in deed have a firmware problem, just not the firmware problem that they recover for free from.

I really don't see how a drive overlay (that's a software device, not a part of your hard disk) could be causing this problem. Put one of the flaky drives in a PC and see what capacity MHDD's identify unit function reports. Is your NAS box a RAID5 or one of those JBOD deals? I would hope not to be a RAID0 with so many drives, but I've seen similarly stupid things in the past!

If you can get Seagate to recover them for you, make sure they understand that they have to deliver images of the drives, not files. Lots of those places are pretty dim in their warranty departments and may not even understand how to request that.

your BIOS have changed it become only limited capacity 32 MB.

_________________
Спасибо
СУТИОНО / АПИНГ

Thanks for replies. If we revert in BIOS to original capaciy of 1TB what is risk to data given that 2 out of the 4 disks in array have this issue?

will not risk to data anymore.

_________________
Спасибо
СУТИОНО / АПИНГ

Now THERE's a surprise!!!

_________________
PC Image Data Recovery
http://www.pcimage.co.uk

New!! HDD-PCB.COM for all your PCB and donor HDD requirements!

Hi,

You should be able to easily fix 32gb problem if it's just a HPA issue.
And it's definitely NOT covered by Seagate free recovery.

If you don't know how - send it to professionals, but be carefull in choosing if you need that data.
i365 looks as the best choice for Seagates as only they have access to some proprietary info.

Sure ?

I actually just saw a NAS box a few days ago with a problem where it misreported the capacity of the drives installed. It turned out to be a problem with the built in Linux derivative OS that had become corrupted. The drives themselves were fine if installed into a computer, but the data got corrupted anyway because the stripe size was altered due to the malfunction (Linux software RAID), information was written, and the stupid system tried to rebuild the "degraded" RAID5 array. Much fun this thing was. Only got a fairly small amount of information back unfortunately. Fortunately, most of the information was in other places as well, so relatively little was lost.

The operating system on this particular box was not on the drive, but on flash memory in the thing.

Anyway, what I'm getting at, is that you need to make sure something's not stoned on your NAS box before you trust it again. Mirror, array, fault tolerant or not, if it misbehaves and decides to restripe itself or otherwise make some low level modifications, you're not getting much back if anything. Remember, failure and corruption is one thing, data overwritten by a drunk RAID machine is another.

Absolutely.
Do you know anybody else who have contacts in Seagate f/w department and can get "special" f/w compiled just for them?

SURE ????
I'm not sure !!!

I spoke to the head of customer engineering and asked for some info on terminal mode. He said I'd have to get a NDA first from their legal department. Their legal department ignored the two letters I sent to them (not e-mails). Apparently, this guy was just giving me the run-around.

I've never felt I could trust Seagate at all. Get REAL help from them? Dream on . . . .

_________________
http://www.datasaversllc.com