The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2008-2009
Seagate's fix for a bricked hard drive bricked more hard drives
A 2009 firmware bug locked Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives in a BSY error invisible to the BIOS — and Seagate's first fix bricked healthy 500GB drives too.
Seagate Technology · 2009-01-17
What happened
Barracuda 7200.11 drives manufactured through December 2008, along with the related DiamondMax 22 and Barracuda ES.2 SATA families, carried a firmware bug that could leave a drive stuck in a BSY (busy) state after a power cycle — invisible to the BIOS, unreadable by the computer, and with no obvious external damage.
On January 17, 2009, Seagate issued a preventative firmware update, SD1A, meant to stop the BSY lockups before they happened. Instead, the update itself bricked healthy 500GB Barracuda drives that had shown no fault, according to owner reports flooding Seagate's own support forum, which grew to dozens of pages within days.
Seagate withdrew the SD1A update and offered free data recovery to affected customers while it worked on a corrected fix, eventually releasing updated firmware for the full range of drives the bug touched. Owners who had already applied the bad update, or hit the BSY bug directly, had to send drives back to Seagate or use manual recovery procedures that involved opening a serial connection to the drive's controller board.
Why it happened
- Seagate shipped the SD1A firmware fix without testing it across every drive model and capacity it was meant to cover, and the gap showed up as new bricked drives instead of fewer.
- A firmware bug that should have been caught before the Barracuda 7200.11 shipped instead surfaced after hundreds of thousands of drives were already installed in customers' machines.
The lesson
A firmware fix for a bricking bug that itself bricks drives is the same mistake twice — Seagate tested SD1A on some drives and shipped it to all of them.
Aftermath
Seagate withdrew SD1A within days and offered free data recovery while developing a corrected firmware release for the affected Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA and DiamondMax 22 families. The episode remains one of the most-discussed hard-drive firmware failures in enthusiast forums, and the manual recovery procedure — opening a serial connection to bypass the BSY lock — is still documented online more than a decade later.
Sources
- Tom's Hardware — Seagate's Update Bricking Working HDDs
- The Register — Seagate customers swamped by Barracuda drive failures
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