Filed under: Peripherals, Troubleshooting, Mac Pro
Take two of the Seagate saga
When we last left this running soap opera of some Seagate hard drives failing, the drive manufacturer had issued some firmware fixes, then pulled a couple out of circulation, and now has returned them with some fixes for the fixes.The firmware updater, at first glance, looks like it needs a Windows PC, but the reality is the ISO images, once burned to a CD, will boot on an Intel based Mac. They will not work on any PowerPC platform, so don't even try. I was surprised that these discs would boot, but it worked for me and there are similar reports all over the tech support boards.
Let me state up front that firmware updates can be deadly, and only try this if you have good, recent backups of all your data. This is really important, because if it fails because you haven't followed the instructions, your hard drive is offline. The data will be OK, but it will not be accessible. Seagate is saying they will retrieve data from problem drives, but that is a slow process and a gigantic hassle.
These instructions are for a Mac Pro, which are the Macs most likely to have added internal drives. If you are brave, and only if you are brave, read on for the steps...
Go to this Seagate support page, scroll down and determine if your Seagate drive is one of the models that is likely to fail. To find out your model, serial number and firmware number consult the 'About this Mac' option under your Apple menu. Then click on 'More Info' and click on the 'Serial-ATA' text to get a list of your drives or drives. If they match the specs of suspect drives from Seagate, you can proceed. To match they must be the same model number and firmware version.
Clicking on the model number of your drive will take you another page that will let you download an ISO image file, which is the firmware update. You can use the Apple Disc Utility to burn a CD of this image. If you are doing this on a Mac Pro, it would be a good idea to slide all the drives out that are not going to be updated. In my case, I had a Western Digital and a Maxtor drive that were not going to be updated, so I removed them.
You then start up your Mac holding the 'C' key down and you should boot from the firmware disc. It will look a lot like DOS (since it is), and you follow the prompts to scan for the drive that needs the update. Then apply the update, making sure you are matching the correct model number on screen to what you have. After a short time you'll be told to exit and shut down. When you are shut down you can restart your Mac, holding the option key down so you can elect to start up on your now updated internal drive. If by chance, the drive you have updated is not a startup drive, then before powering up the Mac go ahead and replace the other hard drives you had taken out.
Once you are at the Mac desktop run System Profiler and check to see if your firmware is updated. On my Barracuda drive I went from SD15 to SD1A which is the newer, repaired firmware.
A couple of caveats: I had a morning full of pain because I could not get my keyboard to recognize the 'option' key being held down so I could choose the startup disk after the update. That was because my keyboard was plugged into my Apple 30" monitor, which acts like a hub. When I moved the keyboard to the front panel USB port all was well again. I'm also told that some of the Apple aluminum keyboards have a similar problem, even when plugged in directly, so you might want to have an old standby keyboard available.
I can't really recommend people try this unless they are very confident, but it is working for many people. Seagate really needs to get better Mac support, and they are going to have to do something about non-Intel Macs. Remember that this fix will not help you if you have an external drive with one of these bad Seagate disks. Seagate is just going to have to come out with a better solution. Finally, and once again, back up any drives you are going to try this update on. Inhale deeply. Cross fingers.
Clicking on the model number of your drive will take you another page that will let you download an ISO image file, which is the firmware update. You can use the Apple Disc Utility to burn a CD of this image. If you are doing this on a Mac Pro, it would be a good idea to slide all the drives out that are not going to be updated. In my case, I had a Western Digital and a Maxtor drive that were not going to be updated, so I removed them.
You then start up your Mac holding the 'C' key down and you should boot from the firmware disc. It will look a lot like DOS (since it is), and you follow the prompts to scan for the drive that needs the update. Then apply the update, making sure you are matching the correct model number on screen to what you have. After a short time you'll be told to exit and shut down. When you are shut down you can restart your Mac, holding the option key down so you can elect to start up on your now updated internal drive. If by chance, the drive you have updated is not a startup drive, then before powering up the Mac go ahead and replace the other hard drives you had taken out.
Once you are at the Mac desktop run System Profiler and check to see if your firmware is updated. On my Barracuda drive I went from SD15 to SD1A which is the newer, repaired firmware.
A couple of caveats: I had a morning full of pain because I could not get my keyboard to recognize the 'option' key being held down so I could choose the startup disk after the update. That was because my keyboard was plugged into my Apple 30" monitor, which acts like a hub. When I moved the keyboard to the front panel USB port all was well again. I'm also told that some of the Apple aluminum keyboards have a similar problem, even when plugged in directly, so you might want to have an old standby keyboard available.
I can't really recommend people try this unless they are very confident, but it is working for many people. Seagate really needs to get better Mac support, and they are going to have to do something about non-Intel Macs. Remember that this fix will not help you if you have an external drive with one of these bad Seagate disks. Seagate is just going to have to come out with a better solution. Finally, and once again, back up any drives you are going to try this update on. Inhale deeply. Cross fingers.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
letter10 said 6:48PM on 1-23-2009
i lost one that was 3 months old! should i think about the firmware update on the replacement they sent to me?
Reply
D.J. said 7:25PM on 1-23-2009
You mentioned it won't work on externals. Not second guessing, but... before I go through the process of trying to figure out 'why' myself... well.. why? :)
I ordered one of these drives on Amazon, and then a day later I started hearing about how they were failing on all sorts of blogs. Then it showed up around the time the firmware update become available. But yea... Seagate and their Mac support is really lacking.
Fortunately, I bought it to use AS a backup drive, so if it goes south, I should be fine with simply getting Seagate to replace the thing and then re-backup onto the new one. That's a pain though. I want to get this update to work. :-/
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oakie said 10:22AM on 1-24-2009
it has to be hooked up directly to a disk controller and not a usb or firewire interpreter like most external drives are. the only exception would be esata.
it needs to be directly addressed by a drive controller for the firmware updater to correctly identify the drive and communicate directly with the drive's onboard controller.
you can go ahead and try, but it aint gonna go nowhere. the firmware updater just wont see any drive it can update.
man, mac users are really shielded from the darker side of hardware. :/
D.J. said 10:41AM on 1-24-2009
Man... I was going to say "Thanks!" until that quick lil jab in there at the end.
Not turning into a PC vs. Mac thing, but I bet you'd be extraordinarily hard pressed to find a single percent of PC users that have a clue what a 'drive controller' even is. Just sayin'. :)
Chris said 7:28PM on 1-23-2009
I’ve got two 1.5 TB Barracudas I’m really concerned about. I have them in a D-Link NAS and pray they don’t fail. They both came from Amazon with the CCH1 firmware which appears to be good. I guess time will tell. Hopefully I’ll be one of the fortunate ones that doesn’t have to play the warranty/data loss games.
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Jeff711@aristotle.net said 7:32PM on 1-23-2009
We have updated seven drives with the new firmware updater burned to a disc, all on three different Mac Pro's. We went so far as to unplug all the drives and update each drive one at a time (two machines had three bad drives each). All updates were successful.
For our updates, we pulled the startup drive as well, this forced the machine to boot from the disc. The whole process took maybe 10 minutes for each machine.
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Dude said 7:32PM on 1-23-2009
So, is there a way to determine what drive is in my Free Agent 1.5TB enclosure? When I ran the drive detector... well, it didn't look like any of the listed serials on the support site.
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Ken said 1:54PM on 1-25-2009
Although this is of limited value to Dude and Mike:
Using "About this Mac" and Disk Utility, I didn't see any pertinent model/firmware/serial info about my two 1.5TB FreeAgent Desk for Mac. So, I took them apart, and, as expected, they contain ST31500341AS. However, the serial numbers came back as being not affected.
Dude said 9:25AM on 1-26-2009
That is a bit scary that there isn't a way to determine that. I ran it through the various utilities under parallels as well and it never did give me the proper serial of the internal drive.
Does this mean the stated (just noticed) model ST315005FDA2E1-RK means nothing?
Ken said 10:08AM on 1-26-2009
You got me thinking, and, before I disassembled my drive enclosures, I remember seeing a serial number on the bottom. I could have sworn that punched those numbers into their online serial number check utility and it spit back an error implying an invalid serial number.
I tried it again this morning and both serial numbers come back as not affected. Now I feel kinda silly for taking my enclosures apart.
Dude said 12:43PM on 1-26-2009
Ken, on another note, any trouble with either of your drives and the "clicking failure" that seems to be an epidemic for these? I thought mine was affected but it seems to have been (knock on wood) a faulty power supply connection.
Ken said 3:34PM on 1-26-2009
I bought these drives on 12/15/08 and haven't noticed any issues so far. However, the drives are in a different room than my computer, so I don't see them all the time. I do access data on them regularly, though.
Rick said 7:40PM on 1-23-2009
What if your drive is already borked. Will this fix it or do I have to send it in for data retrieval?
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Bernard Ramsey said 7:42PM on 1-23-2009
I have two 750s that needed the firmware update. I burned the ISOs to cds using Disk Utility, rebooted, and updated both drives firmware. No problem after the firmware updates :)
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Sam said 7:49PM on 1-23-2009
I've been reading for a while and have not yet posted so pardon the lack of proper etiquette.
I'm in a bit of a jam. This is my situation:
Drobo (Firewire 800)
4 Barracudas within the Drobo (3 x 1TB, 1 x 1.5TB) - All are afflicted, but functioning fine for the time being (fingers crossed)
Intel iMac
No SATA PCs available (I'm working on getting IT at my job to take care of this for me)
I'm getting the idea that booting off the ISO disc won't recognize any external drives and definitely won't recognize them within my Drobo.
Unfortunately the whole point of the Drobo is to act as my backup and reliable primary storage for my media (about 2.2 TB at this point). It would be expensive and very time consuming (and in some ways maybe risky) to try to buy some giant drive to drop a copy of all my data to while I work on flashing the Barracudas.
Is there an alternative? Should I just ship my drives one by one to Seagate? Should I try to wait it out for a better alternative? Any advice is welcome (questions also).
Thanks Everyone!
Sam
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Ry said 8:37PM on 1-23-2009
This is my problem too. I have a a 2nd Gen Drobo with 4 Seagate 1.5 TB drives in it )at 75% full. I have multiple laptops, 1 PC with no SATA, & a G5 PowerMac so I have no way of putting the firmware on the hard drives. I would have to buy new hard drives and a new drobo to back all of my info up and yet still no way to reflash with new firmware.
So, in reality, I need a new Drobo to back that one up in case a drobo caught fire or something anyways, but this is unsat with these Seagate drives having firmware issues like this and with no way to correct the issue.
Paul said 8:06PM on 1-23-2009
I have two of the 1TB drives in bays 2 and 3 in my MacPro, and I updated them both, but one at a time.
I couldn't get the update to work with the drive in bay 3, but worked fine when I switched it into bay 2.
Just thought I'd let you know.
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Maxwell said 8:17PM on 1-23-2009
My question is: How can you tell what hard drive is installed in an external Firewire drive? Disk Utility and About This Mac only show the case/controller manufacturer names.
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Ed said 8:14PM on 1-23-2009
I have 2 1TB drives in bays 3 & 4 in my Pro. They are set up in a mirrored raid... I updated both firmwares at the same time and it worked fine... Even better the one drive stopped ticking. Big plus.
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michael smith said 8:17PM on 1-23-2009
We have 20 or 30 of these drives. I wrote seagate support and now word back at all. You'd think that $3k worth of drives would be enough to at least get a "hey, how's it going?"
By the way.. why doesn't it work on externals again? Has to be plugged in Sata? It would be nice to have more of an explanation on this.
Reply