Barracuda owners who flashed their disks with the firmware found that after they rebooted, they'd receive a system disk failure error message. Backups, if they were stored on the same drive that was flashed, also became unavailable.

If you have a Barracuda hard drive, best follow this forum thread to keep updated on news from Seagate. Hopefully, the next "fix" they release isn't such a mess. [Slashdot]

Seagate's got a support page setup now where you can check if you've gotta one of the susceptible-to-death drives and download the firmware update that'll supposedly innoculate it against the brickage. If your drive is already borked, you get to the go through the fun support process to get your free data recovery—the screwy firmware doesn't actually kill the data on the drive, so Seagate should be able to get it back, no problem.

I know people are very weird about what hard drives they will or won't use after a crash—I still have a weird thing about Hitachi drives—so how much does this shake your faith in Seagate? [Seagate via Techreport]

The company—which has been deleting messages from customers reporting on the problem left, right, and center—has offered a software fix, but it's saying that people are not entitled to any other kind of compensation or replacement. I smell class-action lawsuit. [The Inquirer via Electronista]