MacOSG: MacBook Seagate hard drives catastrophically failing
Posted by Dave Merten 
Nov 26, 2007 at 7:14pm
If you own a MacBook and all of a sudden it freezes, and/or get a flashing question mark when booting, you may have just lost your hard drive. The drive fails so catastrophically, that even a data recovery service can not retrieve your data.
There are quite a few Seagate hard drives failing in MacBooks. Retrodata, a data recovery service in the UK, has posted the following statement on their Web site.
“It has come to our attention from the sheer volume of this particular drive received for recovery that they have a critical manufacturing flaw.”
“The faulty drives are all Seagate 2.5” drives that are manufactured in China, with a Firmware revision of 7.01. They are also all SATA interface. No other drives seem (at this stage) to be affected.”
“We are receiving quantities of these drives for recovery, and nearly all display the same cause of failure. The read/write heads appear to fail mechanically, quickly causing deep scratches to the platter surface, and rendering the drives practically unrecoverable.”
“Should you have one of these drives in your system, we believe the problem is serious enough to warrant copying all your data off the drive and replacing it with an alternative drive, or a retail-version Seagate drive.”
So, how can you determine if your drive is one of these mentioned? Open your System Profiler in your Utilities folder and look under Serial-ATA for the Revision, which shows the firmware of your hard drive. If yours is indeed Revision 7.01, you should back up your data immediately!
If your MacBook is still in warranty, I would suggest contacting Apple ASAP and get the hard drive replaced. Ironically, if your MacBook is out of warranty, Seagate will not replace the drive (because it’s an OEM drive), even though their retail version of the drive is warranted for five years. They tell you to contact Apple for replacement.
Mac Owners Support Group—aka MacOSG—was conceived by Dave Merten, the former ‘Focus on Mac Support’ guide at About.com. Since it’s humble beginning as ‘G5 Owners Support Group’ back in February 2004, MacOSG has become one of the world’s fastest-growing online Apple User Groups, dedicated to helping Mac users from all over the globe.
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Dave Merten
Dave was one of the founding guides at ‘The Mining Company,’ now known as About.com, in February 1998. Dave was their ‘Focus on Mac Support’ guide. In 2004 he started ‘G5 Owners Support Group,’ and in 2005, renamed it ‘Mac Owners Support Group.’ In 2006, he started the ‘MacOSG Support Corner’ column here at Macsimum News.
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