Into.the.Void.

This post is about a friend who had a faulty (firmware bug) hard disk replaced by Seagate…

A few months ago she bought a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500 GB loaded with firmware SD15. This specific firmware is known to be buggy and Seagate has provided a firmware upgrade for them, but of course she had no idea about that bug. Everything was OK until one day, suddenly, the BIOS couldn’t detect the disk. It didn’t take her long to find out the cause of the problem…

After several failed attempts to upgrade her firmware following the instructions placed at Seagate’s site she decided to send her disk to Greek companies that specialized on data recovery. One of them broke the seals of her disk but failed(!!) to do anything else. The other companies, asked a serious amount of money, 200-1000 Euros(!!!) in order to handle her case/take a preliminary look at the disk.

Fed up with those companies she finally decided to contact Seagate herself and she was given instructions via telephone to complete the online application form for technical support and data recovery.

The very next day, a courier took her disk, delivered it to Seagate Labs at Amsterdam and within a week, she had her disk brought back, totally repaired, with all her data intact(!!). Everything was free and her data was saved.

So the next time you have a hard disk problem, especially if it is a Seagate disk, contact Seagate before contacting these “specialized data recovery companies”. sigh.

Filed by kargig at 11:06 under General,Greek,Internet
Tags: barracuda 7200.11, bios, bug, crash, data recovery, firmware sd15, hard disk, recovery, sd15, seagate
4 Comments | 7,338 views

To cut the story as short as possible let’s say that someone rents some dedicated servers somewhere in a big hosting company. I occasionally do some administrative tasks for him.
A server stopped responding and was unbootable on October 1st, one disk had crashed, then the hosting company did a huge mistake, I notified them about it and then they did another even bigger mistake (security issue) on the next day, October 2nd. I re-notified them about it…
So you can either read the whole story or if you are only interested on the security issue, skip the first day and go straight to October 2nd.

Some details, the server had 2 disks, sda with the OS (Debian 4.0) with Plesk control panel and sdb which had some backup files.

October 1st 2009:
10:10 I got a telephone call to help on that server because it looked dead and it couldn’t even be rebooted from the hosting’s company control panel.
10:15 I contacted the company’s support by email and notified them of the problem.
(more…)

Filed by kargig at 13:29 under Linux
Tags: compromise, customer support, debian, fail, hard disk, Linux, lsattr, password, plesk, rootkit, security, shv4, shv5, trojan, ttyload, ttymon, vulnerability
6 Comments | 20,589 views