HDD GURU FORUMS

Hi,

I'm hoping for some help here as I'm kinda stuck. I have several Seagate drives that I want to update the firmware on as I suspect it'll sort some issues I'm having with SMART errors.

The drives are Dell OEM ST91000640, currently on FW A02 (which I believe to be pretty old). Now.....Seatools simply tells me there is no update for them, off to the Dell website we went and found several packages to update to A09. However the packages wont run as the drives aren't in a Poweredge! I've tried several OS flavours, both 32 and 64 bit and nothing will work.

I have the actual firmware image (extracted from one of the Dell packages) but I need something to write it to the drives?

There has to be a command line tool or something out there that will just upload a firmware image to a drive no? (yes I'm aware of the potential consequences of getting it wrong etc. etc.

Any help much appreciated!!

There's a way for you to remap the module for this model.If the data is vital,perhaps you can start working with cloning / backup data as quickly possible.

Mine is not to reason why, but if you wish to proceed with the update, you could try SeaFlash (sf.exe or FLDnnn.exe). Note that Dell update images usually have a header which must be stripped off. SeaFlash is included with Seagate's earlier FreeDOS based retail updates. Current updates appear to be Linux based.

If you could provide a link to the image (or upload it here), I could have a look for you.

There are several command options (-f, -i, -m) that are important.

http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/sf_usage.txt
http://www.users.on.net/~fzabkar/sf.exe

fzabkar,

If you could help with this it would be greatly appreciated indeed, I'm pretty sure the SMART errors are historical from the previous environment they were in (either that or something funky in the OEM firmware). I'm nearly done running the long test on the third drive using Seatools and they're showing up clean.

I'd be perfectly happy to keep using them as is but I need to install Windows on at least one of them and can't as Windows wont install on a drive with a SMART trip.

I've attached the Dell firmware file (zipped).

Many many thanks already!!

A firmware update will not clear your SMART errors. If that is your intention, then there is no point in proceeding.