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Seagate Hard Drive Fiasco Grows

Posted by Soulskill on from the drowning-barracuda dept.

AnInkle writes "Two months after acknowledging that their flagship 1.5TB Barracuda 7200.11s could hang while streaming video or during low-speed file transfers, Seagate again faces a swell of complaints about more drives failing just months after purchase. Again, The Tech Report pursued the matter until they received a response acknowledging the bricking issue. Seagate says they've isolated a 'potential firmware issue.' They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.' If users don't like the idea of an expensive data-laden paperweight, Seagate is offering a firmware upgrade to address the matter, as well as data recovery services if needed. By offering free data recovery, Seagate seems to be trying to head off what could become a PR nightmare that may affect several models under both the Seagate and Maxtor brands."

46 of 452 comments (clear)

  1. Coming to a disaster near you. by Ostracus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    You better believe PR nightmare. After this how many will ever trust either the company or their products again?

    --
    Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
    1. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Everybody.

      Over the past 20 years--its never been a question of the "perfect storage media vendor"--its been a question of "who has screwed me--lately?".

      --JSS, fromer Amiga HW Engineer, Rework tech of 400,000 defective Seagate HDD's, Class of '94.

    2. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Aladrin · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Sadly, the AC is mostly correct. Everyone has brands they love and hate according to how often they've died.

      I abhor Maxtor and love WD. I've met other techs that love Maxtor and abhor WD.

      It actually just so happens that I'm using a Seagate 320GB in this machine and it's started to act funny lately. I've never had an issue with their drives before, but then... I haven't used them much.

      With this report, I may just buy another WD and replace it rather than wait for something to happen.

      --
      "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    3. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Kent+Recal · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I will.
      Shit like this happens from time to time, read up on IBM's legendary "deathstar" fiasco to see how to really turn such a thing into a PR disaster.

      Seagate on the other hand is acknowledging the issue and seems to be communicating about it as open as possible. Plus they offer RMA and recovery services. What more can they do, really?

      We have bought almost exclusively seagate for our S-ATA disks over the past 5 years because their failure rate has consistently been lower than that of the competition. They have a reputation to lose and it seems like they're trying their best to keep it.

      I see no reason why one screwed up model should remove my trust in a company that has served us well for so long. Cut them some slack and compare your historic failure rates of seagate drives versus others.

    4. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by shawn(at)fsu · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I will. All companies will have a problem from time to time if they've been in the game long enough. At least Seagate is showing they will stand behind their product and offer assistance to help the user get their data back.

      Mistakes will always happen, it's their response that counts.

      --
      500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
    5. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      So you're the one who keeps sending me internets all the time.

    6. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Smooth+and+Shiny · · Score: 5, Informative

      I think you have that backwards, no? Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way around.

    7. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Sopor42 · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I will always trust Seagate...

      ...if not to produce 100% failure-proof designs, then to do everything they can to fix the problem and make it right by the costumer.

      Years ago I had a Barracuda die and need replacement under warranty. It was real clear when I sent it in that there was NO guarantee of any sort for my data. What I received back was a different drive (different serial) complete with ALL of my data. That's as good as I can ask for.

    8. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by FromellaSlob · · Score: 5, Informative

      You're suffering from some data retrieval issues:

      Maxtor bought Quantum in 2000.
      Seagate bought Maxtor in 2006.
      Hitachi bought IBM HDD division in 2002.

    9. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by daoine_sidhe · · Score: 5, Informative

      Sadly, many of the Seagate HDDs are losing the 5 year warranty and moving to three. Here.

    10. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Why anyone would trust hard drives with names like Fireball and DeathStar is beyond me.

    11. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by KikassAssassin · · Score: 4, Informative

      On top of that, all of Western Digital's performance-tuned "Caviar Black" line of drives are now carrying 5-year warranties (in addition to their enterprise-class and Raptor drives, which have always had 5-year warranties). I used to be a big Seagate fanboy and only bought their drives when possible, but lately I've been a lot more impressed with Western Digital's product lineup. My next hard drive purchase will probably be WD.

    12. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Hurricane78 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Question: How do you know the failure rate of the other companies' drives, when you almost exclusively buy Seagate drives?
      Those two or three other drives are far from a usable statistic don't you think?

      So what's left is what you heard, or what you remember from 5 years before.

      --
      Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
    13. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Darkk · · Score: 3, Informative

      I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.

      Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.

    14. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by camperdave · · Score: 3, Funny

      Because none of us are worried about raptor attacks...

      Are you kidding? It's a matter of life and death!

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    15. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by choco · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hmmmm.

      I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs - Server and Desktop.

      On the Desktop, the Maxtor Story has been simply appalling. Fortunately we backup data properly and keep spares in the server room - so when a HDD dies, it's nothing more than a PITA. I don't even bother checking whether there's any kind of warranty. I don't want a replacement from Maxtor even if it is free.

      On the Server - well I was persuaded to buy some Seagate/Maxtor drives specifically intended for RAID. Everything cross checked for compatibility.

      Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason. "Hot Spare" prevented serious consequences, but the situation was not sustainable. A firmware flash improved things - but not enough. We've still got those drives lying around in boxes somewhere and give them to employees who want a HDD.

      So we went with WD and their (very) top end stuff.
      Result : Not hugely different.

      Current policy here is Raptors on the Desktop. They seem to be performing well.

      Top-end SAS only on the Servers and Raid. Even then only with every component fully cross-checked for specific support. If we are anything less than mega-fussy, it bites us!

      A.

      --
      AJB
    16. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Metasquares · · Score: 5, Interesting

      One thing I've found firsthand is that it isn't always the drive itself that's at fault. I had a similar experience with Seagate - not a single problem before they bought Maxtor (and not the other way around), but problems began to occur in later models. At first, it was just one drive, which I backed up and returned for repairs. They sent me a new one, but that didn't work either. I figured I was done with Seagate and bought a WD drive, which seemed to work for a while.

      When it too started experiencing problems, I decided to delve deeper into the problem, suspecting something wrong with the system itself. The root cause was actually my power supply, which was supplying very low voltage on both the 5V and 12V rails. I replaced the supply and all of the drives resumed working properly.

    17. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anpheus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Why are you buying a bunch of drives in bulk and then using them all at the same time? I think the Google study found that drives manufactured in the same plant, at close to the same time have a greater probability of failing in twos or threes within short periods of time. Why not play Hard Drive Roulette and throw a WD, Seagate and whatever else you can find in -at the same time-? Sure, your drives won't all have exactly the same read/write speed, but the odds of those drives having anything in common hardware defect wise is minuscule.

      Here's the relevant quote:

      "Failure rates are known to be highly correlated with drive models, manufacturers and vintages [18]. Our results do not contradict this fact. For example, Figure 2 changes significantly when we normalize failure rates per each drive model. Most age-related results are impacted by drive vintages. However, in this paper, we do not show a breakdown of drives per manufacturer, model, or vintage due to the proprietary nature of these data." from http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf

      What this should tell you as a sysadmin is: stop equipping your server with X brand spanking new bleeding edge Ys from manufacturer Z. Sprinkle a few more letters in there, mix it up. You're less likely to wake up some morning and find that you had two drives kick the proverbial bit bucket in a two hour timespan.

    18. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Hmmmm.

      I'm CTO of a Telco and we buy and use a lot of HDDs

       

      Result ? Several lost night's sleep while I drove 100 miles to Data Centres to reset RAIDs where one of the HDDs has dropped out for no apparent reason.

      No matter what it says on your business card, you're not a CTO, poser.

    19. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by gweihir · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I agree that Seagate quality has been really bad recently. I got a new ES drive some time ago, that left the factory obviously dead (easy visible mechanical damage). Incidentially it was made in China, which seems to be a sure way to bring quality down by a large step.

      Howerver Seagate bought Maxtor, not the other way round. Maxtor had good drives, if handled right. What killed them was that their drives were only reliable when cooled well. I have had about 50 run 24/7 in an air-conditioned server room for 3 years with only 2 failures and these did give ample warning before dying and were very likely droppend in shipping. But run them hot and they die young. As they also had relatively high power consumption, this was a recipe for desaster. So their problem was marketing a professional product to an amateur market.

      As to good quality, Samsung looks pretty decent at this time, WD is reliable but has interface issues, i.e. incompatibilities. This can also be seen by them needing "Raid-Edition" drives, because their normal SATA drives keep dropping out of RAID arrays. No other manufacturer has this issue with healty drives. Hitachi seems to be reasonable again today.

      I think this just goes in waves: As soon as a HDD manufacturer is perceived to deliver good quality, some greedy incompetent in management pushes more and more for lower prices. This crosses a threshold at some point and quality drops sharply. Then they lie about it (IBM) or try to cover it up with long warranties (Seagate). At some time their sales have dropped low enough that they actually start to think about fixing the problem and a few years later, they have a good product again. I think the only one not hit so far is Samsung. Maybe this is due to them never aiming for the speed crown.

      The fix is to follow the development closely. Also things that look suspicuous, e.g. HDDs made in China or supposedly much better new technology should prompt a closer look. Sometimes you will be hit nonetheless.

      --
      Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    20. Re:Coming to a disaster near you. by NormalVisual · · Score: 3, Informative

      This can also be seen by them needing "Raid-Edition" drives, because their normal SATA drives keep dropping out of RAID arrays. No other manufacturer has this issue with healty drives

      Seagate recently had the same problem with some of their drives. Spontaneously dropping out of RAID arrays is often a symptom of the drive experiencing occasional read/write errors and taking too long on the retry, which prompts the controller to kick it from the array. This can manifest itself on a single-drive system as a temporary lockup while the drive figures out what to go do with itself. The "RAID-edition" drives shorten the retry cycle substantially, which keeps the RAID controller happy.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
  2. Say what? by nametaken · · Score: 5, Funny

    " They say there's 'no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive;' however, 'the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on.'" ...so, my data is there, I just can't see it? That's reassuring.

    1. Re:Say what? by NormalVisual · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's a totally different issue, albeit still an annoying one. The SD15 issue results in the drive reporting BSY continuously (seems to be kind of NCQ-related bug in the firmware) , which prevents the computer's BIOS from being able to see it on power up, which does effectively brick the drive. The problem only shows itself on power-up (the drives don't die while the machine is running), and the only way to bring the drive back to life once it's in that state is to connect to it via the drive's on-board serial port, and reset the BSY signal manually via the terminal interface. Once that's been done, the drive can then be flashed with the new firmware without data loss, but otherwise it's a paperweight unless you happen to have the little external RS-232 interface board needed for this adventure along with a bit of courage.

      --
      Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
    2. Re:Say what? by SpaceLifeForm · · Score: 4, Funny

      Not yet.

      This definitely sounds of firmware bloat,
      and the resultant problems due to complexity.

      Why, I remember, back in the day, when I could
      easily separate the media from the electronics.

      Head go bad? Move the media to another drive.
      In seconds.

      Yes, it wasn't the fastest to access, but it
      was reliable, and if you encountered problems,
      not that difficult or time-consuming to recover.

      The greatest danger was dropping the media
      and bending the media making it really bad
      to put into a drive.

      If you don't know what I'm talking about,
      you are young and inexperienced.

      --
      You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
  3. MS-Windows Only? No by markdavis · · Score: 5, Informative

    And, of course, the Seagate referenced page says: "This can be done in Windows - it's easy! Download and run, or simply run as is, the Seagate Drive Detect software program." No mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD. So I guess there is an implied "If you are not using Windows - it's hard!".

    Then later in the page, "you can download SeaTools for Windows" with a convenient link. Again, no mention of Linux, MacOS, Solaris, or BSD.

    What they don't tell you is that you can create a self-booting (MS)-DOS floppy/CD so you can test your drive, regardless of your OS (as long as the system is X86). Get it here: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/seatools/seatooldreg but if you DO need to flash it, you have to contact Seagate via Email and wait for a response and code so you can use yet another program to flash the drive.

  4. Bye Bye Seagate by the_raptor · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Given Seagates increasingly poor product quality, this has guaranteed I will never buy another Seagate drive. They used to be my favourite manufacturer, but this kind of sloppiness is unacceptable. Obviously all they care about is turning out high density cheap drives, with no thought to real quality assurance.

    With the economy as it is this could spell the death of Seagate.

    --

    ========
    CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
    1. Re:Bye Bye Seagate by TooMuchToDo · · Score: 4, Informative

      I doubt it. I own a hosting company and we buy about 5-10K drives a month from Seagate. We'll continue to buy drives from them, just not the ones they're having problems with (the 1.5TBs). Their service for us has been fantastic (and should be because of our volume with them). Feel free to not buy another drive from them. You'll be stuck in the same boat as US cellular customers. There's only a handful of businesses to choose from, and you have to buy from one of them if you need the product *shrugs*

  5. Re:On linux... by leighklotz · · Score: 4, Informative

    Oops, hdparm not sdparm. And note the option is uppercase "i".
        hdparm -I /dev/sda
    For your second:
        hdparm -I /dev/sdb

  6. Re:On linux... by windsurfer619 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Better yet:
    sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda | grep Model

  7. The firmware is on bittorrent by ArchieBunker · · Score: 5, Informative

    Save yourself the time and effort, the required firmware updates are on bittorrent http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4627627/Seagate_1.5TB_ST31500341AS_Firmware_Update

    --
    Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
    1. Re:The firmware is on bittorrent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Right. Because if I need to make an update to the drives in my critical hardware, I am DEFINITELY going to download something from The Pirate Bay instead of getting it from the official support channel. I mean, come on--some guy on Slashdot told me it was just as good.

    2. Re:The firmware is on bittorrent by N7DR · · Score: 3, Informative

      I note that Seagate says (at http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=206091): "Desktop and Mobile SATA and PATA drives are not designed for firmware updates in the field."

  8. Re:When did Microsoft get control of Seagate? by markdavis · · Score: 5, Informative

    Oh, it gets better. We purchased two expensive 15,000 RPM SCA drives recently to work as backups for our RAID arrays on our Linux servers. Called Seagate *FIRST* to verify compatibility, as well as with Adaptec. Then a few months later when we needed to use one to replace a failed drive, it would NOT negotiate properly, making it useless.

    Hours on the phone with Seagate we FINALLY get confirmation that there is a "firmware problem" with the drives we have and we should "upgrade the firmware". We go through the crap of getting a "key" and being sent the firmware only to find that their self-booting program would not run on our servers. Their suggestion? Find some other SCSI SCA machine just lying around and try it there. WE DON'T HAVE any such machines. We asked if we could mail the expensive, useless drives to them so THEY could upgrade the firmware. The response was "you can send in the drives for exchange, but we can't guarantee the drives sent back will have the firmware you need". This is support?????

  9. Re:Do smaller size models have this problem? by the_B0fh · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you can't make the fucking effort to go read the article and follow the links, why should we do it for you?

  10. But what is the replacement policy? by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Informative
    The last time I had to replace a Seagate drive (about 3 years ago) I discovered that they had changed the way they replace drives. Years prior when I was a fan of their products, their replacement policy was to send the replacement drive to you first, so you could get your data off the failing drive and then send it back and have only a very minimal amount of downtime.

    However, this replacement for me was the opposite process, only worse. They also had a list of other things I had to comply with in order to get a replacement for a drive that failed when only 2 months old:
    • It had to be packed in their anti-static clamshell case
    • The case had to be in at least 2 inches of foam (no packing peanuts or bubble wrap allowed)
    • The box had to meet a prescribed standard
    • I had to pay for insured shipping both ways

    Needless to say, I wasn't happy with that. I spent some time on the phone with them, after spending two days running around town trying to find shipping materials that would comply with their asinine requirements (they stated they would void the warranty on my drive if I failed to comply with the packing requirements). Eventually I convinced the person on the phone - we'll call him Raj - to talk to his manager about the situation. Raj then was able to to get his manager to eventually approve of sending the drive first, so I would have the proper packing materials to send my drive back in.

    And then when the replacement arrived, there was a copy of a note that Raj had written while on the phone with me where he described me as "extremely irate". If I ever have to deal with them again, they'll see what irate really is when it comes from me...

    --
    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
    1. Re:But what is the replacement policy? by ZorinLynx · · Score: 5, Informative

      I'm wondering if you got stuck with clueless support personnel, or it was a special case, or what.

      I've replaced several drives in that timeframe. The standard procedure is always to send the replacement first, and send the old one back in the same box, pre-paid. (IE, it doesn't cost you anything)

      They take your credit card details as insurance (otherwise an unscrupulous person would use this method to steal a hard drive by pretending theirs is bad) but that's acceptable.

      All the drive manufacturers I've dealt with (seagate, WD, Maxtor) work this way...

  11. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And I've had 2 WD Caviar 160GB drives that crapped out on me in the 9 months before I switched manufacturers. Thank god for backups.

    That's the problem with anecdotal recommendations. They're always true, but rarely useful in the "statistically relevant" sense.

  12. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by radish · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Well I only buy Seagate, and of the dozens I've bought...well they're all still working thanks. Anecdote's are pointless, Seagate are doing the decent thing here - saying we screwed up (it happens) - here's a new firmware and if you lost data we'll pay to try and get it back. That's a lot more than they're required to do and more than most companies would do. I don't see any reason to give them a hard time, or stop buying their products.

    --

    ---- Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"

  13. Re:Seagate has sucked for years by daoine_sidhe · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I can tell you from my decade of experience as a technician and running a small shop that Seagate HDDs have the lowest failure rate in the business.

    See how that works? This is why anecdotes are useless.

  14. Firmware programs all written for DOS/Win by minion · · Score: 3, Informative

    I don't understand why manufacturer's keep insisting on writing the apps for Windows or DOS, with the growing trend to use these drives in other systems.

    I use Supermicro systems in my datacenter, and the coolest thing is, all of their flash utils, and CDROM discs boot FreeDOS. This alleviates the problem that you just might not be running Windows on your server. I wish all manufacturers would get the hint.

    --

    -- If we don't stand up for our rights, now, there will be no right to stand up for them later.
  15. eula just to get service by bugi · · Score: 5, Informative

    I tried getting through their contact page. It was incredibly frustrating, and they won't even let you contact them unless you agree to some ridiculous terms absolving them from anything and everything, allowing them to email you whenever they want, stuff like that, in order to signup for an account.

    Google's a little more helpful. This page at least might be kinda sorta related: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/support/downloads/other_downloads/cuda-fw

    Then I tried to search for some of the terms in the title of the page (eg. "SD14") and it couldn't find any pages. That's some search function you've got there, Seagate -- it isn't by any chance hooked up to an empty database is it? Did you by chance have it on a 7200.11 drive?

    1. Re:eula just to get service by Spikeles · · Score: 3, Informative

      Customers can expedite assistance by sending an email to Seagate (discsupport@seagate.com). Please include the following disk drive information: model number, serial number and current firmware revision. We will respond, promptly, to your email request with appropriate instructions.

      --
      I don't need to test my programs.. I have an error correcting modem.
  16. Re:End-of-Times for magnetic storage? by Zymergy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'd wager ALL (or a good portion) of the magnetic hard drive manufacturer's BEST people are working on their prototype SSD units (NOT magnetic drives and their respective firmware)...

    Magnetic Media Hard Drives have now entered the time of their final epic journey to join their ancestors, Betamax, Cassettes, and 8-Track (et al.) at the great campfire in the sky...

  17. It's a non-issue, folks by mcrbids · · Score: 3, Informative

    I bought two of the Seagate 1.5 TB drives. I put them through the standard 7-day torture test pre-deployment before they went into production, which revealed a problem. A quick google search revealed that I wasn't the only one.

    Seagate support emailed me a firmware update that completely solved the problem. (knock on wood) They then easily passed the next round of torture test, and have been in production ever since as part of a D2D backup storage array.

    What parent poster says is true - ALL manufacturers have the occasional bad seed. In my experience, hard drive failures are usually due to mfg defects, much less so due to "wearing out". I have the most problems within the first month of purchase, or 5 years later, but I have plenty of drives from about 1 GB on up that have seen so many years of heavy, continuous use that their size is no longer relevant, but still work beautifully.

    --
    I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  18. Not all servers are Windows by Sits · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some people really do have x86 servers that aren't Windows... Being able to build a DOS "disk" for flashing purposes on such "1%" machines (because it's not feasible to put Windows on) is extremely important in such scenarios and doesn't seem unreasonable.

    There really is a not-insignificant chunk of other stuff out there.

  19. Re:RS-232? Really? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Yup, just RS-232 with TTL matching circuitry. A little board like this one does just fine although you do have to give the board +5VDC and jumper TX/RX to the appropriate pins on the drive. For the 7200.11s, there is a block of four pins adjacent to the SATA data connector on the back of the drive - the pin closest to the SATA connector is RX, and the one right next to it is TX. Note that this will just give you a terminal interface to the controller, as opposed to letting you actually use the drive for its intended purpose.

    This is just freakin' cool.

    Fry's isn't open at this hour, but I built one of those a few years ago and dug it out of my parts box, and yes, you can talk to the bare metal of the drive this way. (Failing that, I found a schematic that does the same thing with a 74LS14, seeing as how most serial ports can speak TTL now by default!)

    Anyways, looks like there are commands for diagnostics, memory peeking/poking, raw sector reads/writes, the works. 38400 8N1, or 9600 8N1. (Googling around, looks like some Samsung drives with Marvell "CPU"s like 57600 8N1)

    Got the T> prompt, level "T" meaning "T"ests, and you can "Q"uery it. There appears to be self-help, pressing "?".

    /A, /C, /1..9, seems to change command levels
    At level C (F3 C&gt prompt, "F3" refers to the architecture, "C" refers to the level), you can get a list of all commands with "Q", for Query.
    ^V echoes commands on, useful.
    ^C resets/spinsdown the drive.

    More googling...

    Looks like there are two groups of people: One group of Eastern European hackers intent on protecting their commercial ability to do data recovery -- there's an expensive but slick GUI wrapper around some of the common fixes, and everyone in Eastern Europe (I wound up in a Russian and a Polish forum) seems friendly enough to talk about hacking the terminal interface, but (obviously) doesn't want to give a cookbook answer. (I do kinda respect the "Read between the lines of our hints and you'll eventually figure it out!" attitude, though. :)

    For instance, the tail end of this video (which is basically the "cookbook" answer for the commercial product, and provides a lot of hints at the DIY solution -- the video doesn't show the commands being sent via the terminal window, as I guess that'd make it too easy :)... but the status window of the commercial tool, plus the status bits at the bottom of the GUI screen, makes it clear what's going on. Specificlaly, the status log shows the results of commands that have arguments that look an awful lot like the ones that the drive's self-help output, like this one:
    Level T m: Rev 0001.0000, Flash, FormatPartition, m[Partition],[FormatOpts],[DefectListOpts],[MaxWrRetryCnt],[MaxRdRetryCnt],[MaxEccTLevel],[MaxCertifyTrkRewrit es],[ValidKey]

    The video also shows some drive (or drive board?) powering on/off activity. These appear to be the level 2 commands "U" (SpinUpDrive), "Z" (SpinDownDrive), and/or the level 1 command "e" (SpinDownAndResetDrive. And/or some other commands that I haven't figured out, to power down the drive so that the PCB can be removed for the BSY fix, then power it back up again after the PCB's plugged back into the "drive" half of the drive.

    Not sure if those are the same as the power on/off things the video is showing, or if there are other commands to control power. Also not sure about things like SmartControl, (level 1 "N"), but maybe that's how to clear things like the SMART list (/1 to get to level 1, then N1 to clear it?)

    There also appears to be a fairly active thread at msfn.org about a "Look, just hook the drive up to a serial port, and be careful not to make any typos, and remember that all the control-characters are case-sensitive" sor