Fix 0LBA And BSY HDD Errors

One of the worst moments almost every hacker has experienced is a hard drive inexplicably dieing. And of course, its at the most inopportune time and you’ve had no chance to backup!

Recently there has been an influx of Seagate hard drives (specifically the 2700.11s) kicking the bucket with firmware errors 0LBA and BSY. The good news is [Gradius2] has made guides to unbrick your drive without having to match serials.

The procedure is lengthy, complicated, can easily become expensive, and there is the possibility of losing your data so it’s not recommended if you’re only getting those pictures of Mr.Fluffykins back. In such a case, Thermite might be a bit better solution.

[Thanks Calvin]

21 thoughts on “Fix 0LBA And BSY HDD Errors

  1. When mine borked (it was in an external enclosure) I simply installed it in my desktop PC and did a firmware update on it. I had to get ahold of Seagate to get the correct file, but it worked perfectly. Total time for the procedure, including emailing their tech support, was about two hours.

  2. This happened to my girlfriend’s PC last week. Fortunately we got it going again using a guide similar to this.

    @RustyBadger: drives with the BSY flag error cannot be powered up at all until this fixing procedure is done. Then you can install a working firmware afterwards.

  3. I was the victim of my 1TB Barracuda drive getting stuck in the BSY state. I seriously considered the DIY fix (which is by no means new, I don’t see why this deserves a posting here), but I decided to see what Seagate is doing about all of this.
    Five days ago I called Seagate support (go to warranty extension on the phone). Email support was incredibly useless, they gave me a link to the firmware update and closed the case –and a second time after I reopened it. Anyway, I had a short talk with the warranty guy, let him know I know what I’m talking about, and he confirmed the drive had the firmware problem. He transferred me to the technical line where the problem was once again confirmed and I was given the phone number to i365, the Seagate data recovery people.
    Slightly confusing here, just dial 0 for “other”. Give them your case number, they’ll give you a website to apply to to have it sent in.

    They pay $5 for packaging at UPS Stores, it’s free shipping OVERNIGHT to one of their facilities and they let you know when it comes in and how the job went. They send it back UPS ground. It’s coming Tuesday, all my partitions restored, no risk involved (on my end). I can assume their process is very similar to the DIY method, and while it’s nice to know I could have done it myself easily enough, I didn’t have all the necessary hardware on hand and this just seems easier.
    The only thing is that they do a sector-by-sector imaging of the disk and keep it for 14 days (then to be overwritten), which I’m not a fan of but I’m sure it’s just standard procedure. Just unnecessary.

  4. @Whatnot

    Putty is a great program… but is not include in almost every iteration of windows.

    This is probably the main reason people use it in these projects instead of putty.

    It’s the type of mentality below that causes the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principal to kick in.

    “Oh.. i need to install or grab some other software to do this… I’ll skip this and move onto the next project”

  5. Wow, amazing timing. I lost a harddrive with this exact problem not 4 days ago, and I already had plans in a few hours to go take this to professionals to look at. I’ll dig into this and I’ll report back on how it went.

  6. Thank you Hackaday this saved the last 3 years of my life, and my 750gig.

    It died about a month ago and I used it to backup all my import work.

    Worked like a dream :D

  7. bsy fix works. m0,2,2,,,,0 not responding, and yeah i had to switch off and on again..except my drive bcame RAW afterwards. Recovering my files right now.
    they tell you don’t switch off at partition regen but what if the drive takes days to do it?? it did for me and no response watsoever!!

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