On Tue, Jan 20, 2009 at 7:00 PM, David C. Rankin wrote:

Greg Freemyer wrote:

...

All,

I just created a bugzilla that OS should detect the known bad Seagate drives and post a warning to the user.

https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=467740

If you agree with me, please vote for it.

Greg

+2 votes (I'm glad I don't have any of these ;-)

We have about 40 that match the model numbers in question. I haven't seen a list of firmware revs yet that are affected. FYI: We have had a lot of drive failures, so I'm sure we have bad drives. I just don't know which ones. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org

On Wed, Jan 21, 2009 at 3:46 AM, Dominique Leuenberger wrote:

...

...

...

On 1/21/2009 at 1:58 AM, "Greg Freemyer" wrote:

...

We have about 40 that match the model numbers in question. I haven't seen a list of firmware revs yet that are affected.

FYI: We have had a lot of drive failures, so I'm sure we have bad drives. I just don't know which ones.

From the Seagate KB: Affected drives are from the series Barracuda 7200.11 DiamondMax 22 Barracuda ES.2 SATA

Apparently Seagate is not having all the information to identify themself if the disk is affected by the problem, and they actually recommend against flashing the disks firmware 'to prevent' anything. The suggestion goes clearly in the way of 'crash and flash'.

I'm very confused by that. Do you have a link that says "crash and flash" or similar. It is my understanding that once is crashes, it is too late. The firmware can no longer be upgraded. At least not via the standard process. AIUI, the drive simply becomes unrecognizable and is effectively a brick. Data recovery can be performed, but it is not a simple matter of applying software tools that are readily available. I have not seen it officially, but I have seen unofficial mailing list posts saying that Seagate is offering free data recovery services for drives that have bricked themselves due to this firmware bug.

The fact that there seems not to exist a (public) table of affected bios revisions (yet) would also make it close to impossible to create a tool that can identify if your disk is at risk. Just because you have the correct model can't be an indication, as the user might already have the newest bios applied.

I believe there is a partial list of known bad firmware releases and for those there is a recommended firmware upgrade. New info is expected as Seagate investigates the situation. So the situation is dynamic. It seems there are 2 choices: 1) The community (Novell or even a more comprehensive Linux community team) monitor the situation and roll-out notifications / recommendations as they become available. This was done for the faulty laptop batteries, so the mechanisms are in place. I believe all that is needed is config files for HAL. 2) Have everyone that purchased one of the potentially affected models research the Seagate recommendations on a regular basis. I believe 1) is the best for the community and given the severity of the problem it is a minimal amount of effort. Greg -- Greg Freemyer Litigation Triage Solutions Specialist http://www.linkedin.com/in/gregfreemyer First 99 Days Litigation White Paper - http://www.norcrossgroup.com/forms/whitepapers/99%20Days%20whitepaper.pdf The Norcross Group The Intersection of Evidence & Technology http://www.norcrossgroup.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org