Everyone knows that hard drive failures are a depressing thing to deal with especially if you have data on the drive that is valuable and irreplaceable, even more so if the said hard drive has a failure due to a bad firmware. 18 months ago I had built a system for a friend that included a 500 GB Seagate (ST3500320AS) drive that had the SD15 firmware and at the time I did not know about the SD15 firmware bug … heck, no one knew since the bug was too new. Last week I got a call from my friend saying that there is something wrong with his computer. I went over there thinking it was a simple issue but the drive would no longer be detected by the bios but still had power and was spinning up like usual. The SD15 Firmware issue is where the bios would no longer detect your drive and would prevent you from upgrading or accessing the drive with your computer or any external hard drive case.
After some quick research about the SD15 issue and a little one on one chat with a Seagate Representative I found out that Seagate now provides the ability to get a free data recovery from their recovery company i365. After a few questions such as asking me if the drive still spins and if I hear noise coming from the drive when I turn the computer on, they gave me a case # and a phone number to call. During the simple process of filling out an online form on the i365 website I found out that not only are they doing the recovery for free they also ship and package the drive for free if you ship it from a UPS Store. It’s awesome because I didn’t have any packaging at my house at the time and I didn’t want to go though the trouble of having to buy it myself.
After filling out the form I went ahead and called an i365 Representative to ask them about their recovery process and he told me that they fix the problem itself by upgrading the firmware on the drive to get it operational again. This is fine since the drive has a 5 year warranty and I’ve already told my friend to back up anything important on some other media. I received an email from i365 stating that they confirmed the SD15 issue and that they have made a full backup of the drive to protect against any drive shipment issues (damage, lost, etc.) and they will be shipping the drive shortly. I got the drive a little over a week after I shipped the drive and still had my friends computer at the house. I popped in the drive and booted it and it went right into windows with no problem, issue fixed! I know some other techies would know how to upgrade a firmware with some extra gadgets that you would buy but for people like me that don't know how and wouldn't want to have a chance of screwing anything up this is great way of doing it.
A little note for readers with an identical problem, Make sure to contact Seagate directly on this issue because i365 requires a customer reference number from Seagate in order to provide the free recovery. Tell them it’s a firmware issue and exactly what the problem you’re having. I’m not sure if this will fix the problem of the 0 MB drive issue I’ve heard about on the same firmware’s but if you do find out please let me know.
I think Seagate is doing a wonderful job dealing with the firmware issue that has had so much negative talk during the last few months. I now know that if any firmware issue plagues my drive I’m sure Seagate can help me out with this free recovery service, at least until the drive goes out of warranty.
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