Dell/Seagate ST1200MM0007 cannot update to ISO6

Hello people.

I purchased a couple of these drives for use in my kludge-tastic home server.

They are intended to be connected to an IBM M5110 as controller flashed to be a "generic" Lsi 2308 IT mode card.

One came with firmware version ISO4, the other with ISO5.

After some fighting, and plugging them in to a Dell h200 that I also purchased (still in ir mode), I managed to get them both up to ISO5, but the "SAS_DRIVE_FIRMWARE_2DDG2_LN_ISO6_A.BIN" refuses to run on these drives.

The error it throws is simply "This update Package is not compatible with your system configuration".

Things I have tried:
Connecting them to the 2308 - same error
Connecting them to the h200 - same error
Creating a virtual machine with a spoofed Dell smbios posing as a Dell r730 with the h200 passed through to the vm running almalinux 9.8 - same error
Extracting the ISO6.fwh file and flashing with sg_write_buffer in a whole lot of variations - rejected
Attempting to update with various methods with the Seagate 003.lod - rejected

Some of these were suggested by googles search ai, but I did check sources.

The problem I am having is they seem to reset after a variable amount of time and get dropped from the bus.

The same ai suggested that ISO6 was made to deal with the droppages.

This is my first time dealing with enterprise HDDs,

Here are the links so that people who want to help you don't need to search for the updates like I had to:

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=vvjhp (IS04)
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=pnvwc (IS05)
https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-au/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=2ddg2 (IS06)

Dell's header:

Code:: Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F 00000000 20 20 20 20 44 45 4C 4C 39 49 53 30 36 49 53 30 DELL9IS06IS0 00000010 30 78 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0x.............. 00000020 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 ................ 00000030 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 02 ................ 00000040 20 20 31 30 30 36 34 31 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 100641 00000050 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 00000060 20 20 20 20 53 54 31 32 30 30 4D 4D 30 30 30 37 ST1200MM0007 00000070 20 20 31 30 30 36 38 30 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 100680 00000080 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 20 00000090 20 20 20 20 20 53 54 39 30 30 4D 4D 30 30 30 37 ST900MM0007

The above header needs to be stripped off if you want to use non-Dell methods.

Alternatively, try changing 0x39 to 0x09:

Code:: Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F 00000000 20 20 20 20 44 45 4C 4C 39 49 53 30 36 49 53 30 DELL9IS06IS0 ^^ 00000010 30 78 02 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0x..............

This is the 05 header:

Code:: Offset(h) 00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 0A 0B 0C 0D 0E 0F 00000000 20 20 20 20 44 45 4C 4C 09 49 53 30 35 49 53 30 DELL.IS05IS0 ^^ 00000010 30 78 01 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 0x..............

My apologies for not posting links to the updates.

I'm not super familiar with hex editing.

The first part (removing the Dell header) looks simple enough, but my unfamiliarity has left me a little confused by the second part

Well, that was unexpectedly easy in the end. Thank you for letting me know the exact border of the Dell header.

Sg_write_buffer --mode=7 --in./ISO6-EDITED.fwh /dev/sg5 worked instantly.

Thank you your help.

Out of curiosity, would there be any advantage to flashing them as a Seagate disk with the 0003 firmware from the Seagate site? (I can't get a direct link I'm afraid, I could upload the firmware file?)

I can't advise you as to the safety of "cross-flashing", ie mixing OEM and retail firmware versions. I have seen instances where people have done this with SATA drives and bricked them. Personally, I would not do it, but user @E123 would be the expert in this regard.

BTW, I use a free hex editor:

https://mh-nexus.de/en/hxd/

I strongly advise against modifying the disk OEM firmware. I use various USB enclosures and SATA disk boxes are cheap. SAS boxes are uncommon but available if files need to be moved.

The ST1200MM0007 is the standard model for Seagate based on their literature. This class of disk gave way to SSD products in servers. Now Dell OEM disks should work in an enclosure but they might not work in a non Dell server in a RAID array.

The IBM M5110 is from System X which IBM supports SATA and SAS disks. These controllers are available on fleabay for $50.

Higher capacity hard disks are available but prices have spiked significantly. U.2 SSD are available up to 250TB if 44TB isn't cutting it.

Advice Acknowledged on cross flashing.

The drives seem to work fine mechanically and as far as enterprise drives are concerned.

However they seem to spin down and become inaccessible after a certain time (smart to -a and other commands return a failure, sdparm --all returned "MODE SENSE(10) failed, device not ready"). This was the reason for updating to ISO6, but they still seem to exhibit the same behaviour.

You could use smartmontools (smartctl) to view the drive's internal error logs.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/zhubv2/interpreting_sas_smart_data/

If the disks are spinning down it suggests the disks are experiencing faults. Changing firmware will have no effect on this. Instead check the power on hours on the disks and if the are very high it could be they are worn out.

fzabkar wrote:You could use smartmontools (smartctl) to view the drive's internal error logs.

Example: https://old.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/zhubv2/interpreting_sas_smart_data/

im not particularly experienced with smart data, but i THINK these are ok:

Code:: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Vendor: SEAGATE Product: ST1200MM0007 Revision: IS06 Compliance: SPC-4 User Capacity: 1,200,243,695,616 bytes [1.20 TB] Logical block size: 512 bytes LU is fully provisioned Rotation Rate: 10000 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches Logical Unit id: 0x5000c5007dff31cb Serial number: S3L0ST1X Device type: disk Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-4) Local Time is: Mon Jun 22 23:13:05 2026 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled Temperature Warning: Disabled or Not Supported === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Health Status: OK Current Drive Temperature: 45 C Drive Trip Temperature: 60 C Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 63928:03 Manufactured in week 40 of year 2014 Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 10000 Accumulated start-stop cycles: 78 Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 300000 Accumulated load-unload cycles: 2797 Elements in grown defect list: 0 Vendor (Seagate Cache) information Blocks sent to initiator = 1863997383 Blocks received from initiator = 2025387004 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 2315512278 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 380999265 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 146 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 63928.05 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 45 Error counter log: Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors read: 3773297794 0 0 3773297794 0 464459.324 0 write: 0 0 18 18 18 256003.806 0 verify: 12323876 0 0 12323876 0 3.618 0 Non-medium error count: 2 SMART Self-test log Num Test Status segment LifeTime LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ] Description number (hours) # 1 Background short Completed 64 63866 - [- - -] # 2 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 3 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 4 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 5 Background short Completed 64 7 - [- - -] # 6 Reserved(7) Completed 48 7 - [- - -] # 7 Reserved(7) Completed 48 6 - [- - -] # 8 Background short Completed 48 4 - [- - -]

and

Code:: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Vendor: SEAGATE Product: ST1200MM0007 Revision: IS06 Compliance: SPC-4 User Capacity: 1,200,243,695,616 bytes [1.20 TB] Logical block size: 512 bytes LU is fully provisioned Rotation Rate: 10000 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches Logical Unit id: 0x5000c5007dff31cb Serial number: S3L0ST1X Device type: disk Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-4) Local Time is: Mon Jun 22 23:13:05 2026 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled Temperature Warning: Disabled or Not Supported === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Health Status: OK Current Drive Temperature: 45 C Drive Trip Temperature: 60 C Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 63928:03 Manufactured in week 40 of year 2014 Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 10000 Accumulated start-stop cycles: 78 Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 300000 Accumulated load-unload cycles: 2797 Elements in grown defect list: 0 Vendor (Seagate Cache) information Blocks sent to initiator = 1863997383 Blocks received from initiator = 2025387004 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 2315512278 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 380999265 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 146 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 63928.05 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 45 Error counter log: Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors read: 3773297794 0 0 3773297794 0 464459.324 0 write: 0 0 18 18 18 256003.806 0 verify: 12323876 0 0 12323876 0 3.618 0 Non-medium error count: 2 SMART Self-test log Num Test Status segment LifeTime LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ] Description number (hours) # 1 Background short Completed 64 63866 - [- - -] # 2 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 3 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 4 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 5 Background short Completed 64 7 - [- - -] # 6 Reserved(7) Completed 48 7 - [- - -] # 7 Reserved(7) Completed 48 6 - [- - -] # 8 Background short Completed 48 4 - [- - -]

they spin up and accessible again if i run

Code:: sudo sg_start --start /dev/sg*

also, they have no data on them yet as the first thing i did was run a smart test, and found they reset during testing.

googling this had the ai (i know) tell me that the sas driver might be getting a timeout of inactivity while the disk does something in the background and ISO6 was supposed to help, and it also gave me some commands/configs to extend the timeout.

this could be incorrect of course. i will try writing some data to them and test their read/write

i wrote data to both drives, almost to capacity, with no errors.

"smartctl -a" gives this for one:

Code:: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Vendor: SEAGATE Product: ST1200MM0007 Revision: IS06 Compliance: SPC-4 User Capacity: 1,200,243,695,616 bytes [1.20 TB] Logical block size: 512 bytes LU is fully provisioned Rotation Rate: 10000 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches Logical Unit id: 0x5000c5007dff31cb Serial number: S3L0ST1X Device type: disk Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-4) Local Time is: Tue Jun 23 15:50:50 2026 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled Temperature Warning: Disabled or Not Supported === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Health Status: OK Current Drive Temperature: 52 C Drive Trip Temperature: 60 C Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 63944:41 Manufactured in week 40 of year 2014 Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 10000 Accumulated start-stop cycles: 81 Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 300000 Accumulated load-unload cycles: 2800 Elements in grown defect list: 0 Vendor (Seagate Cache) information Blocks sent to initiator = 2835228570 Blocks received from initiator = 4149471905 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 2414814652 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 382649282 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 146 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 63944.68 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 21 Error counter log: Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors read: 663374276 0 0 663374276 0 464956.595 0 write: 0 0 18 18 18 257091.385 0 verify: 12323876 0 0 12323876 0 3.618 0 Non-medium error count: 2 SMART Self-test log Num Test Status segment LifeTime LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ] Description number (hours) # 1 Background short Completed 64 63866 - [- - -] # 2 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 3 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 4 Background long Aborted (device reset ?) 64 63840 - [- - -] # 5 Background short Completed 64 7 - [- - -] # 6 Reserved(7) Completed 48 7 - [- - -] # 7 Reserved(7) Completed 48 6 - [- - -] # 8 Background short Completed 48 4 - [- - -] Long (extended) Self-test duration: 8400 seconds [140.0 minutes]

and this for the other:

Code:: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Vendor: SEAGATE Product: ST1200MM0007 Revision: IS06 Compliance: SPC-4 User Capacity: 1,200,243,695,616 bytes [1.20 TB] Logical block size: 512 bytes LU is fully provisioned Rotation Rate: 10000 rpm Form Factor: 2.5 inches Logical Unit id: 0x5000c500717ecb33 Serial number: S3L055K3 Device type: disk Transport protocol: SAS (SPL-4) Local Time is: Tue Jun 23 15:52:57 2026 BST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled Temperature Warning: Disabled or Not Supported === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART Health Status: OK Current Drive Temperature: 48 C Drive Trip Temperature: 60 C Accumulated power on time, hours:minutes 36647:12 Manufactured in week 04 of year 2014 Specified cycle count over device lifetime: 10000 Accumulated start-stop cycles: 59 Specified load-unload count over device lifetime: 300000 Accumulated load-unload cycles: 1664 Elements in grown defect list: 0 Vendor (Seagate Cache) information Blocks sent to initiator = 3337334440 Blocks received from initiator = 596105458 Blocks read from cache and sent to initiator = 185720872 Number of read and write commands whose size <= segment size = 1012258103 Number of read and write commands whose size > segment size = 265 Vendor (Seagate/Hitachi) factory information number of hours powered up = 36647.20 number of minutes until next internal SMART test = 0 Error counter log: Errors Corrected by Total Correction Gigabytes Total ECC rereads/ errors algorithm processed uncorrected fast | delayed rewrites corrected invocations [10^9 bytes] errors read: 3060109606 25 0 3060109631 25 625598.846 0 write: 0 0 11 11 11 85306.297 0 verify: 3123592830 3 0 3123592833 3 200039.215 0 Non-medium error count: 49 SMART Self-test log Num Test Status segment LifeTime LBA_first_err [SK ASC ASQ] Description number (hours) # 1 Background short Completed 48 36538 - [- - -] # 2 Background short Completed 48 36537 - [- - -] # 3 Background long Completed 48 36536 - [- - -] # 4 Background short Completed 48 3 - [- - -] # 5 Reserved(7) Completed 32 3 - [- - -] # 6 Background short Completed 48 1 - [- - -] Long (extended) Self-test duration: 8400 seconds [140.0 minutes]

they seem to stay active as long as they're being accessed/not idle. i do want them to spin down, but it seems, according to what i have managed to find, theyre not entering standby but stop.

they can be recovered if they do drop out by running

Code:: sudo sg_start --pc=3 /dev/sg2

which brings the drive back and it works fine again.

Perhaps you could disconnect the data cable or leave the drive powered up in your BIOS setup menu. If the drive spins down, then this would suggest an internal idle timeout setting.

The histories of the drives suggest that they were deployed in a server environment with about 20 hours between successive load/unload events.

The power on hours are > 60K hours so these disks are well past their best before date.

fzabkar wrote:Perhaps you could disconnect the data cable or leave the drive powered up in your BIOS setup menu. If the drive spins down, then this would suggest an internal idle timeout setting.

The histories of the drives suggest that they were deployed in a server environment with about 20 hours between successive load/unload events.

it definitely seems to be an idle timeout setting, which i would like to keep enabled.

from what i have been able to find, some sas drives when combined with some controllers can enter the spindown state, and without the backplane/controller telling them to wake will simply report that they are not ready.

the thing i am unable to figure out is how to get my ubuntu install to send the wake commands when it needs access.

Hardcore Games wrote:The power on hours are > 60K hours so these disks are well past their best before date.

they may well have a decent amount of hours on them, but they are testing fine outside of idle timeouts. they have both completed badblocks runs, and as long as theyre kept active they complete smart tests without issue. they have been written to and read from without any issue outside of failing to wake from spindown.

Old disks with 60,000 hours on them are better in the junk box. I have seen some using disks with over 80,000 hours and again I suggest retiring them.

While more expensive lately due to the AI bubble, modern 3.5" disks are somewhat more reliable. I use server disks as these are able to handle anything I can throw at them. I use them as big disks can hold vast collections of games.

U.2 SSD are available up to 250TB if 44TB isn't cutting it.

https://www.jw.com.au/product/phison-d205v-122-88tb-u-2-opal-ent-dual-port-ssd

122.88T for $148,740.00 ? Thats a lot of cash to store your games

HaQue wrote:
U.2 SSD are available up to 250TB if 44TB isn't cutting it.

https://www.jw.com.au/product/phison-d205v-122-88tb-u-2-opal-ent-dual-port-ssd

122.88T for $148,740.00 ? Thats a lot of cash to store your games

That is brutally expensive. Ouch.

Dell/Seagate ST1200MM0007 cannot update to ISO6

Dell/Seagate ST1200MM0007 cannot update to ISO6

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