Several years ago a large number of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 drives were bricked by infamous “busy bug”. Disks affected by this bug won’t be registered in computer’s OS and not visible in the BIOS on power-up. The symptom of the problem is that the drive stays in busy state all the time and upon connecting to the drive’s circuit board with a serial terminal there’s an error code "LED:000000CC FAddr:0024A051". The reason for such malfunction is faulty firmware (microcode controlling drive’s operation) implemented by Seagate engineers. Numerous users have complained of this issue and were discussing it in public forums when discussions in the official Seagate forum were subjected to heavy moderation and subsequently closed.

Data recovery from drives affected by firmware issues is usually performed by correcting and/or rewriting corrupt service modules. Our success rate for such recovery jobs is at least 95%.