Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Gunner Asch wrote:

On Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:20:36 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
? wrote:

?Richard wrote:
?? All the BS can be depressing, but -
??
?? I had to reload Windows on my desk machine. (I hate when that happens!)
??
?? Which means 3 or 4 days of setting everything back up properly.
?? Which also (finally!) includes news group service.
??
?? So, while digging though 110 THOUSAND topics I learned that most of the
?? topics are dead as the dodo. Savagly killed and the bodies left as a
?? warning to anyone passing by.
??
?? So be thankful that this group, despite the noise to signal ratio that
?? you may not like, is alive.
??
?? That's something very special...
?
?
? I started to backup my hard drive this morning to an external 1 TB
?Seagate Free Agent drive. The backup program ran for about 30 seconds
?and the system crashed. The hard drive died, and the external drive is
?trashed, so I may have lost everything. Seagate doesn't recognize the
?serial number as valid, even though that ST31000528AS drive is only a
?couple months old. I pulled the drive and tried it in an external
?housing on another computer. It ran a couple seconds and disappeared
?from the list of drives. Seagate wants a report form their Seatools
?program, but you can't get one if the drive isn't seen. I'm on a Dell
?running Vista. I had to change newsreaders to access the group.
?
? Seamonkey sucks, even though it is the successor to the older
?Netscape software. This mess looks like it was written by someone how
?had never used Usenet. I'm about ready to though the whole mess in the
?driveway and drive over it, repeatedly. This is the first hard drive
?I've had fail in over 12 years, and it had everything on it. The backup
?files on other drives, USB sticks and CD-R are either too old or
?unreadable. If I disappear, you'll know I finally gave up. I can't
?afford a new system, and I'm tired of spending money to keep the old one
?running. This may be goodbye to all the newsgroups I frequent.

My phone number is 805 732 5308 if I can be of any help.

I run into puters with some regularlity...........



It looks like I was bit by Seagate's 'BSY' firmware bug. It affects
a lot of their newer hard drives, and there is a firmware update, but
they don't tell you about it. they also tel you not to use it if you
don't need it. By the time you discover the need, the drive has
failed. Some people report success with a USB to TTL serial interface
and Hyperterm to sent a rest command though the unlabeled four pin port
on the back of the drive that's next to the data port. This is a 1 TB
drive that was in use for under 10 months. It has all the work I've
done for a couple website launches, and details about a lot of other
projects. The backup data on an old drive is trash. I dug out the drive
I replaced with the Seagate and put it back in the computer. I have too
much invested in it to start over. It's a Optiplex GX620 with a dual
core 3.0 GHz processor and 3 GB of new RAM. I am going to try to reset
that drive and recover my data, but Seagate goes back to the bottom of
the list on new drives, again. I preferred WD and a couple Japanese
brands when I owned a computer store, but everyone was telling me that
Seagate was the best on the market, and had the best warranty. If they
are the best, everyone is screwed.



Any heads up on the issue with the Free Agent drive. I have a 500Gb
drive, I didn't see the need for a 1Tb, and I'm using it with Linux. I
did buy it even though it wasn't listed for Linux and all seems OK
including formatting it for various file systems other than DOS/Windows
that it was listed as supporting. The one thing I did note that Linux
may not like is the sleep functionality where it will turn off after a
period and the Linux kernel may not like that if it has gone to sleep
while mounted. I used the Seagate utility under Windows to disable the
sleep facility as I planned to use the drive to backup and then would
remove the drive, energy saving be damned. I did read that under newer
Linux kernels, IIRC you could specify a time to wait for the drive to
wake up which would deal with the issue. Not had to deal with that.

David Billington wrote:

Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Gunner Asch wrote:

On Mon, 08 Aug 2011 22:20:36 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
? wrote:

?Richard wrote:
?? All the BS can be depressing, but -
??
?? I had to reload Windows on my desk machine. (I hate when that happens!)
??
?? Which means 3 or 4 days of setting everything back up properly.
?? Which also (finally!) includes news group service.
??
?? So, while digging though 110 THOUSAND topics I learned that most of the
?? topics are dead as the dodo. Savagly killed and the bodies left as a
?? warning to anyone passing by.
??
?? So be thankful that this group, despite the noise to signal ratio that
?? you may not like, is alive.
??
?? That's something very special...
?
?
? I started to backup my hard drive this morning to an external 1 TB
?Seagate Free Agent drive. The backup program ran for about 30 seconds
?and the system crashed. The hard drive died, and the external drive is
?trashed, so I may have lost everything. Seagate doesn't recognize the
?serial number as valid, even though that ST31000528AS drive is only a
?couple months old. I pulled the drive and tried it in an external
?housing on another computer. It ran a couple seconds and disappeared
?from the list of drives. Seagate wants a report form their Seatools
?program, but you can't get one if the drive isn't seen. I'm on a Dell
?running Vista. I had to change newsreaders to access the group.
?
? Seamonkey sucks, even though it is the successor to the older
?Netscape software. This mess looks like it was written by someone how
?had never used Usenet. I'm about ready to though the whole mess in the
?driveway and drive over it, repeatedly. This is the first hard drive
?I've had fail in over 12 years, and it had everything on it. The backup
?files on other drives, USB sticks and CD-R are either too old or
?unreadable. If I disappear, you'll know I finally gave up. I can't
?afford a new system, and I'm tired of spending money to keep the old one
?running. This may be goodbye to all the newsgroups I frequent.

My phone number is 805 732 5308 if I can be of any help.

I run into puters with some regularlity...........



It looks like I was bit by Seagate's 'BSY' firmware bug. It affects
a lot of their newer hard drives, and there is a firmware update, but
they don't tell you about it. they also tel you not to use it if you
don't need it. By the time you discover the need, the drive has
failed. Some people report success with a USB to TTL serial interface
and Hyperterm to sent a rest command though the unlabeled four pin port
on the back of the drive that's next to the data port. This is a 1 TB
drive that was in use for under 10 months. It has all the work I've
done for a couple website launches, and details about a lot of other
projects. The backup data on an old drive is trash. I dug out the drive
I replaced with the Seagate and put it back in the computer. I have too
much invested in it to start over. It's a Optiplex GX620 with a dual
core 3.0 GHz processor and 3 GB of new RAM. I am going to try to reset
that drive and recover my data, but Seagate goes back to the bottom of
the list on new drives, again. I preferred WD and a couple Japanese
brands when I owned a computer store, but everyone was telling me that
Seagate was the best on the market, and had the best warranty. If they
are the best, everyone is screwed.



Any heads up on the issue with the Free Agent drive. I have a 500Gb
drive, I didn't see the need for a 1Tb, and I'm using it with Linux. I
did buy it even though it wasn't listed for Linux and all seems OK
including formatting it for various file systems other than DOS/Windows
that it was listed as supporting. The one thing I did note that Linux
may not like is the sleep functionality where it will turn off after a
period and the Linux kernel may not like that if it has gone to sleep
while mounted. I used the Seagate utility under Windows to disable the
sleep facility as I planned to use the drive to backup and then would
remove the drive, energy saving be damned. I did read that under newer
Linux kernels, IIRC you could specify a time to wait for the drive to
wake up which would deal with the issue. Not had to deal with that.


The OS has nothing to do with the failure. It s a bug in the firmware
inside the drive. The Free Agent is a standard SATA drive with a USB to
SATA interface in the case. If you run their Seatools, you can see the
actual drive model, used inside the case.


--
Politicians should only get paid if the budget is balanced, and there is
enough left over to pay them.