Lucky me, I guess ...

[inanedirk]

It would appear from this /. article that I was lucky when the firmware update I tried to apply to my hdd only crashed with an error message. Another one released later apparently bricks drives it's supposed to update.

I quite liked Seagate drives, but I doubt my next hdd will be one of theirs.

[edit] Oh well, there's a commenter on that thread who claims to be working for Seagate and giving an inside view of things. So they're at least being honest about what happened.