Data recovery and disk repair questions and discussions related to old-fashioned SATA, SAS, SCSI, IDE, MFM hard drives - any type of storage device that has moving parts
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Re: Maxtor STM3500418AS dead after failed firmware update

January 27th, 2011, 15:39

lcoughey wrote:it would appear that the update you downloaded was for this drive.

Seagate's updater always checks the model number and family, either explicitly (1), or by reference to an update matrix in a configuration file (2).

(1) fdl464.exe -m %family% -f %firmware% -i %model% %options%

(2) fdl464.exe %options% -h %cfgfile%

Here is an example of a decoded configuration file (cfgfile):
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/MS-SD1A.TXT

You can't go wrong with method (2), but method (1) will allow you to apply the firmware update to an incompatible firmware version. For example, you must not download SDxx firmware to a drive with CCxx firmware.
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