FM-25S2S-60GBP2 spontaneously erased itself

[fedup1664522]

I recently bought a FM-25S2S-60GBP2, which had firmware 2.1.

I had transferred files to the drive and everything seemed to be okay, running a recent Linux kernel.

All of the sudden, the BIOS was not able to recognize the drive.

I tried mounting the drive on several other motherboards (Asus P5B-MX, Asus P5QL-VM DO, Asus P7H55-M PRO) as well as with other third-party SATA-II cards, and none of them was able to recognize the drive. Basically, it appeared as if the drive was being probed, but was hanging.

Then, all of the sudden, the drive was able to be recognized everywhere I mounted it, but to my horror, all of the data was completely gone.

I mounted the drive in Linux, I did a disk dump and made an image of the whole drive. The drive was completely zeroed out, not one single non-zero bit on the whole drive.

What in the heck happened, how in the heck did this happen, and why in the heck did this happen?

Did some internal erase function somehow get triggered? If so, this is frightening.

[GSKILL TECH]

Very strange, seems like something with the controller since it is not detecting at times. Send it in for RMA, the new one with new firmware should not have this problem.

Thank you
GSKILL TECH

[fedup1664522]

I'm really trying to determine what happened here, regardless of if "the new one with new firmware should not have this problem". This doesn't exactly inspire confidence.

There is nothing but zeroes on the drive.

What exactly caused this to happen? Did the drive become locked while it was busy deleting my data? Are there any internal functions to zero the drive?

Yes, it's very strange. I have never heard of a hard drive spontaneously erasing itself.

[fedup1664522]

I saw this post which states that the drive will wipe itself clean:

http://www.gskill.us/forum/showpost....84&postcount=2

"Upgrade it to the latest firmware and it should wipe the drive clean."

Could that be what happened to my drive? Could this process have been triggered somehow?

I was not in the process of updating the firmware, but it had intermittent issues being properly recognized by the BIOS.