Seagate offers fix, free data recovery for bricked Barracudas

Well, how about that. Seagate has acknowledged the bricking issue surrounding Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives, and it's trying to make things right by offering a firmware fix and data recovery services. Here's the full statement we received from company spokesman Mike Hall:

Seagate has isolated a potential firmware issue in certain products, including some Barracuda 7200.11 hard drives and related drive families based on this product platform, manufactured through December 2008. In some circumstances, the data on the hard drives may become inaccessible to the user when the host system is powered on*.
As part of our commitment to customer satisfaction, we are offering a free firmware upgrade to those with affected products. To determine whether your product is affected, please visit the Seagate Support web site at http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931.

Support is also available through Seagate's call center: 1-800-SEAGATE (1 800 732-4283)

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. There is no data loss associated with this issue, and the data still resides on the drive. But if you are unable to access your data due to this issue, Seagate will provide free data recovery services. Seagate will work with you to expedite a remedy to minimize any disruption to you or your business.

For a list of international telephone numbers to Seagate Support and alternative methods of contact, please access http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/about/contact_us/

*There is no safety issue with these products.

The free data recovery for already-bricked hard drives seems like a nice touch, especially considering the cost of third-party services. According to the knowledge base entry, though, the issue may affect a fairly large number of drive models—not just the 1TB four-platter drive we talked about earlier this week. Seagate recommends that users with 1.5TB, 750GB, 640GB, 500GB, 320GB, and 160GB Barracuda 7200.11 drives, along with some Maxtor and ES.2 models, all install the firmware update.

Update: Seagate has amended its statement to remove the following sentence: "Retail products potentially affected include the Seagate FreeAgent® Desk and Maxtor OneTouch® 4 storage solutions." We've put up the new statement above.

Hive Five Winner for Best Free Data Recovery Tool: Recuva

Discovering your files are missing is never a good time. Last week we asked you to share your favorite data recovery tools, then we rounded up the top five for your perusal. The result?

User friendly Windows-based Recuva took home the crown for top data recovery tool. If your data woes aren't as simple as undeleting an accidentally deleted file, make sure to check out cross-platform runner up TestDisk, a robust disk repair and data recovery tool. For more information on the other contenders make sure to check out the full Hive Five.

DDR Professional Recovery Software

DDR Professional is safe and affordable do-it-yourself data recovery solution developed to recover lost or accidentally deleted files from all type of removable media drives (Memory card, Mobile phones, Music players, External HDD, USB drive etc) and from fixed hard drive on your PC.

Advanced file retrieval tool helps to get back files whether deleted unintentionally, lost due to disk formats or even if not accessible due to other similar data loss reasons. Software exclusively scan the drive/media and preview list of recoverable files which can be saved at desired location on PC.

Powerful data recovery program works easily under Windows 7/Vista/XP/Server 2008/Server 2003/Server 2010 and other similar Operating systems. Software provides best recovery results even if files lost from storage media while using them on MAC OS X, Linux, Apple Macintosh machines. You need to follow few simple steps, just install DDR Professional Recovery Software on Windows OS supported machines and connect such storage media to get back lost data in few mouse clicks.

http://www.salvagemyfiles.com/salvagemyfiles/professional.html

Welcome to Recovery Review – the biggest collection of data recovery reviews!

Recovery Review strives to help consumers to better comprehend the modern data recovery market with strong emphasis to the do-it-yourself type of products. We carefully select only the best data recovery tools to produce unbiased reviews. We do our best to provide independent opinions on a variety of different data recovery, undelete and unformat tools. You are encouraged to download and use the reviewed tools.

There are several types of data recovery products.

Undelete and unerase utilities simply recover deleted files. You'll certainly find the right type of product if you're looking for a tool to quickly recover a few files.
Hard disk and partition recovery tools recover corrupted hard drives and partitions, repair formatted volumes and fix broken file systems. If you are looking for a tool to fix FAT, NTFS, ext2fs or MacOS logical disks, look no further!
Removable media recovery tools fix and repair data on corrupted USB sticks, ZIP drives, digital cameras, and memory cards such as SD, Compact Flash, MMC, Memory Stick. This category lists tools for portable MP3 and video players such as iPod, iRiver, and Zune.
CD and DVD recovery tools recover data from optical media with incomplete sessions, burn errors or wrong disk parameters.
Password recovery tools provide access to password-protected documents such as ZIP archives, MS Office, and Adobe PDF documents.
Database recovery and repair software fix corrupted databases such as MS Access or FoxPro DBF.
Email recovery tools fix corrupted mailboxes and recover lost email in Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, Outlook Express, Eudora, The Bat!, or Vista Windows Mail.
Everything else includes other useful tools related to data recovery, including secure delete tools, data wipers, and backup software.

In order to keep our site up-to-date, we’re searching for and reviewing new products daily. If you have discovered or developed a new data recovery product, we'd be happy to review it. Just let us know about the product by using our PAD submission form.

Free Data Recovery Software!

Ok, so you didn't have your data backup in place and you lost some files! So long as your hardware was not physically damaged, there is still a chance you may be able to recover your files with free or very inexpensive data recovery software. Free data recovery software is a bit hard to come by but I've rounded up a few good ones for a quick review here. Also, I might add on mention of a few very inexpensive shareware data recovery programs.
First, if your file is very precious, or lost due to partition missing, formatted,or damaged logical hard drive, virus infection, software crash, unexpected shutdown and other unknown reasons, you might also want to consider recovering it using commercial data recovery software like EASEUS Data Recovery Wizard, a utility that we recommend.

Second, if you decide to go the freeware or shareware route, whatever data recovery tool you try just try to use one that DOES NOT REQUIRE INSTALLATION. That's right, the software should run right off floppy, flash or CD. For recovery software that requires installation, you must have a second drive! Otherwise, installation of the recovery software will just permanently overwrite your data. Ouch!

Some helpful tips for using freeware data recovery software
If your drive is making strange noises or reports a CRC read IO error, DO NOT PROCEED. This indicates a hardware failure so your data is not going to be recoverable using "undelete" style data recovery software.
As soon as you realize your data has been deleted, stop using the computer! The less activity the better to avoid dangerous disk-swap activity.
Find and download data recovery software on another computer.
Save the recovery tool to a flash drive and run it directly from there.
Save the extracted data back onto the flash drive for added safety.