Seagate's fix for a bricked hard drive bricked more hard drives

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.