Seagate has now released new firmware for all models of hard drives affected by a software flaw, the company said Thursday.
Seagate has published detailed instructions for how administrators can identify the model of hard drive in service and whether it needs a firmware upgrade. Models affected are the Barracuda 7200.11, ES.2 SATA and DiamondMax 22.
The problem caused some drives to become completely inoperable, while other users found they could not access data on the drives. The new firmware will not fix drives that have become inoperable, the company said.
Seagate is offering customers whose drives are broken data recovery services from its i365 subsidiary. Data on drives that are not inoperable is still on the drives and can be recovered, the company said.
Seagate released new firmware last Friday for the Barracuda 7200.11 drives, but that upgrade was also faulty. Seagate withdrew it on Monday, said company spokesman Ian D. O’Leary.
It was originally thought that drives in the SV35 series, which are designed for surveillance applications, were also affected by the problems, but that now appears not to be the case, O’Leary said.
Seagate said it believes that vast majority of customers using the drives will not have problems. However, the company has not released figures on how many of the drives have been sold and what percentage may be affected.
“We regret any inconvenience that the firmware issues have caused our customers,” according to a statement released Thursday.
