HGST NetApp HUC101812CS4204 drive firmware

[MDBenson]

Hi,

I got here via the Google Machine and another recent thread regarding the same model drives from NetApp, but I have a doozy of a situation going on.

I have 3x of these same HUC101812CS4204 model drives, 1.2TB 10krpm 2.5". NetApp part x425A-R6.

I also have a LSI 9220-8i that is flashed with 9211-8i IT Mode P20 firmware (and I've reflashed it to be 100% sure it's flash is good)

These are installed in a HP Z440 with a SAS/SATA 5.25-2.5 backplane using a MiniSAS-SATA Forward Breakout cable labelled P1-P4 which plugs into 4 SATA ports on the backplane.

When I attach all three drives to the backplane in my PC the 'last' drive works (port P3) okay. The other two never spin up or come to ready. If I knock it down to 2 disks the one on the later port (P2) works but the one on (P1) doesn't work. If I use any combo of any drive in any bay on it's own it works just dandy. I was able to use sg3-utils to reformat all three drives to 512B format successfully with no errors.

Here's where life gets a bit odd. I also have an old Dell SAS6iR (LSI 1068E) card. If I hook that up to the backplane with it's 8084-SATA breakout *all three drives work just fine*. I was able to mount, format all of them and use them in Ubuntu with no issues.

So my next logical step was to try and use HUGO to flash a factory generic firmware on to the drives to see if the firmware was clashing with the controller or causing weird behaviour somehow. But I hit a jam there too.

I have equipped the HBA and backplane with 4 old 36GB Seagate SAS drives and it works just fine.

So, questions I guess:

1. Is HUGO the way to do this? I should just be able to drop the DB0 firmware on each drive, right?

2. The firmware file C4GNCDB0.zip won't unzip. I can see it contains a C4GNCDB0.bin file but can't extract it, it just throws an error. Is this expected?

3. Has anyone come across this kind of issue with similar HGST or ex-NetApp drives?

[MDBenson]

Okay. Answered number 2. - used 7zip and it unzipped fine.

I get the same result as here:

https://forum.hddguru.com/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=42387

Is there likely to be something blocking the firmware update?

Unlike the previous poster mine *don't* work correctly as far as I can tell with the NA00 firmware. And yes, I did format them to 512byte sectors.

[fzabkar]

Could it be a staggered spin-up issue??

[MDBenson]

It could be, but I don't know how I'd go about diagnosing that?

[napalm_atx]

Hi,
2. The firmware file C4GNCDB0.zip won't unzip. I can see it contains a C4GNCDB0.bin file but can't extract it, it just throws an error. Is this expected?

Try use 7-zip, archive packed with LZMA compression

[MDBenson]

Try use 7-zip, archive packed with LZMA compression

Yep, as stated above, using 7zip worked fine. Thanks

So basically this boils down to:

= the NetApp drives have locked firmware that needs specialist tooling to unlock/update. HUGO alone isn't abl;e to do it.
= the LSI 92xx card I have doesn't like the firmware on the NetApp drives (yet seems fine with other SAS drives)
= The LSI 1068E card I have works just fine with the NetApp drives. Like... flawlessly (albeit slower as it's an older card)