Fujitsu Firmware Problems The Fujitsu MPG series of drives suffer from a firmware problem that was first diagnosed in 2001. Fujitsu traced the problem to the chemical constituents in a compound used for the manufacture of the MCU processor on the controller card resulting with errant commands being sent corrupting the firmware.

Prior to the discovery of the problem, the drives were getting excellent reviews and were fast, reliable and quiet. Once the problems surfaced, we became aware of the issue when we started to receive many hard disks for data recovery - all showing similar symptoms. At one point we were receiving over 50 drives a month with the problem.

The problem affected thousands of hard disks in the field and resulted with firmware problems, mainly in the defect mapping, SMART logs and some other firmware modules and logs.

The problems affected the following drives.

• MPF 3102AT 10 GB 5400 RPM
• MPF 3102AH 10 GB 7200 RPM
• MPF 3152AT 15 GB 5400 RPM
• MPG 3102AT 10 GB 5400 RPM
• MPG 3102AH 10 GB 7200 RPM
• MPG 3204AT 20 GB 5400 RPM
• MPG 3204AH 20 GB 7200 RPM
• MPG 3307AT 30 GB 5400 RPM
• MPG 3307AH 30 GB 7200 RPM
• MPG 3409AT 40 GB 5400 RPM
• MPG 3409AH 40 GB 7200 RPM

At the time, MjM Data Recovery Limited were one of only a few companies in the world that managed to repair the drives so that the data could be retrieved. We received drives from all over the world including USA, Australia, Japan, Middle East, Germany, France, and most other countries in Europe.