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Firmware Problems on Seagate SCSI Hard Disk Drives

We first became aware of a problem in Summer 2005 and our software engineers have been working ever since to find a solution to this problem. During October 2006 we made the breakthrough that has enabled us to recover data from drives that suffer with this problem.

Symptoms of Seagate SCSI disk failure

The symptoms are dependent upon the SCSI or RAID controller in use, but generally the drives are still recognised, but report as 0 MB. On the RAID controller the drive may just show as 'Failed'. The problem is that defect map tables or the translator tables stored within the factory zone on the hard disk become corrupt.

The next time the drive powers up after such a failure, the tables are unable to be read correctly and the drive will not initialise correctly and generates a medium or SCSI sense error.

Our software engineers have worked out exactly where these tables are stored in the factory zone of the hard disk and are able to access them and repair the ECC codes to bring the drive back online, at least long enough for data recovery purposes.

To the best of our knowledge, we are one of only a few companies in the world that are able to recover drives with this problem.