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Seagate continues to communicate bad news

by Mel Martin Feb 5th 2009 at 3:00PM

There has been plenty of confusion over the continuing saga of Seagate hard drives with firmware problems that can lead to eventual failure and data loss. We've followed the story here and here.

It hasn't been pretty for either Intel or non-Intel Macs. It would have been nice for Seagate to provide a Mac OS X-native firmware updater for older machines. There must be an awful lot of hard drives out there just waiting to fail. Many people who don't follow tech news don't even know what pain might strike them.

Mac users who had written Seagate about their problems did not get much information, but now there are some more details sent in an email to customers about the bad news for non-Intel based Mac owners. Full email reproduced below:
If you are trying to update your drive firmware with a MAC, you must have an INTEL MAC to allow you to perform this action. If you do not have an INTEL MAC, you will then need to take the drive to a PC, or a MAC with an Intel Processor. If you do not have either, you may need to warranty the drive with Seagate, and the return drive should have the updated firmware upon receipt.

If you have an INTEL MAC, you would simply need to burn the ISO file to CD using the burning utility that you have installed on your system. Once you have the CD created, you will then need to reboot the system with the newly created CD in the CD ROM bay while holding the "C" key on the keyboard to tell the system to boot to the CD rather than the internal hard drive. Once you have booted to the CD, simply follow the onscreen prompts to complete the firmware update. Older Macs that are PowerPC (PowerMac G3,G4,G5, iMac G3,G4,G5) based can not bootup to the FreeDOS. FreeDOS is the operating system that is booted to when booting to the firmware update CD. Please keep in mind that you should always backup the data on the drive before doing the update in case there is data loss. In most cases, the data on the drive should remain in tack and unaltered; however, things happen, and its always better to be prepared in case we come across any obstacles with the integrity of the data on the drive.
Instructions for updating firmware on a Intel based Mac.
1. Download and burn the Firmware ISO that has been provided to you by Seagate for your drive/s
2. Burn the ISO to a CD (how to: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=Mac/10.5/en/8729.html)
3. Insert the freshly burn CD back in to your Mac.
4. Reboot
5. After the Chime press and hold the Option key on the keyboard.
6. Once you see the Apple with the spinning gear beneath, release the Option Key.
7. At this point the system will come to a screen with pictures of hard drives and a CD, the CD should be named Seagate.
8. Click on the CD
9. Click on the arrow pointing to the right.
10. At this point FreeDOS will boot and the on screen instructions should be followed.
Once again, I want to thank you for your business.. If you still need further assistance, or the information provided was not of good use, please feel free to contact Seagate Technical Support at 800-SEAGATE ( 800-732-4283).

Translation: You are well and truly hosed if you don't have access to a Mac Pro or a Windows PC that can update the firmware. People who have returned their drives to Seagate got a refurbished drive, even if a brand new one was sent in for exchange. Worse, there are some scattered reports that the replacement drive still had the bad firmware! Way to go, Seagate: if your Mac-owning user base didn't feel completely screwed over before this, we all probably feel that way now.

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There has been plenty of confusion over the continuing saga of Seagate hard drives with firmware problems that can lead to eventual failure...
 

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repo man

Anyone know how to do the firmware upgrade if the interal Seagate drives are RAIDed?????

February 09 2009 at 6:20 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Paul

What if we have an Intel Mac and not an INTEL MAC? I've never heard that acronym before and I'm wondering if I should be worried.

February 06 2009 at 9:17 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Paul's comment
Han

i don't understand ur question.

February 06 2009 at 9:45 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jaycee

I have an external drive afftected by this bad firmware. It's a 3.5. My Aluminum MacBook has a 2.5 internal. I removed the internal and plugged it, the 3.5 into it and when I booted from the FW update disc and scanned for disks it failed to find my affected drive. It recognized the 2.5 just fine but not the 3.5 so that didn't work either even though it was plugged directly into the MacBook. I suppose I'll just wait and see what happens.

February 05 2009 at 11:02 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Brady J. Frey

I gotta say, Lacie Drives are on my P.O.S list as well. We've lost every single drive that's been Lacie in the past two years, about 10 we bought brand new in bulk. Never again will I purchase their products, regardless how nice the case.

We've been using http://www.fantomdrives.com/ lately without issue... but not sure the drives under that hood...

February 05 2009 at 10:48 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
ars_workerbee

Ah, you forgot the most important step:

2b: Hope LaCie didn't use a Seagate drive

;)

February 05 2009 at 8:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh McCulloch

It appears that MBP users with eSATA external enclosures and an eSATA Express 34 card may be in luck. Check out this thread on the MacGurus forum:

http://macgurus.com/forums/showthread.php?t=25006

Cheers, Josh

February 05 2009 at 4:45 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
kitty

I tried using a maxtor/seagate external drive for airport disk and my data did not remain "in tack." Eventually their phone support said they simply do not support FAT32 so the corrupted directories and data loss were the result and I must reformat (using windows). I will never buy anything else from them!

February 05 2009 at 4:44 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Dewey

I have a 1st gen MacBook and I believe it was a Seagate drive that crashed on me right after my warranty expired. Had to buy a new one. If this is the case, do I have any chance at getting a refund?

February 05 2009 at 4:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh McCulloch

@Han,

Thanks for the feedback. I hadn't given any thought to the fact that the external case's chipset would affect this. I'd sure be curious to find out if anyone has any success with actually trying this. Maybe the good folks over at MacGurus have an answer. They are the Mac eSATA experts...

I also have a 24" Aluminum iMac, but this doesn't help me either... Argh!

The real bummer here is that I've been a great ambassador for Seagate over the years, telling friends and colleagues how great and reliable their drives are, and now this...

Cheers, Josh

February 05 2009 at 4:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Josh McCulloch's comment
Han

well... actually if you are using the alumni imacs... they have sata drives inside..

all you have to do is open the imac... take out the original sata drive...

put in ur drives that are affected with the bad firmware...

put in the cd and boot up and run the firmware upgrade.

i've read everywhere on forums (esp. accelerate your mac) that is works flawlessly.

tell me how it goes!

February 05 2009 at 4:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Han

just got my Sonnet Tempo expresscard (thanks to Gary K) from amazon.com for about $110 (with tax & free shipping)...

i had 2x 1 TB 7200.11 Seagate drives... only one of them were affected by the bad firmware... i downloaded the iso file from seagate and updated both drives from my macbook pro.

the drives were placed in an external quad interface case and connected via eSATA cable to the Sonnet Tempo to the MBP... booted up with the burned ISO image (FreeDOS) and it detected the seagate drives...

this is because (as the other forum explains) there are drivers for the Sonnet Tempo in the ISO image that seagate provides! awesome! they finally did something right.

i would keep the Sonnet Tempo expresscards, but i use that external HD with another seagate 500 GB drive as an emergency boot disk partition. Mac OS X doesn't load the drivers for the Sonnet Tempo during startup so you can't use Sonnet Tempo if you want to use it with a bootable external eSATA drive.

February 11 2009 at 12:38 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Josh McCulloch

Can anyone confirm whether an eSATA Express 34 card in an Intel MBP will work for updating the firmware? I have two 5-bay eSATA enclosures currently connected to an old G4 MDD I'm using as a server that combined have eight 1TB drives with the affected firmware, and needless to say, a) I'm choked that Seagate would leave us hanging like this, and b) I'd like to fix it. I don't own an eSATA Express 34 card, but would consider getting one if it's the only way to fix this...

Cheers, Josh
Josh McCulloch Photography

February 05 2009 at 4:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
2 replies to Josh McCulloch's comment
Han

@josh,

i looked a lot into this... i know exactly what you are thinking.

there are a couple of factors:
1) not all eSATA expresscards will work in this situation in my opinion. since seagate gave us a bootable iso disk... that means the esata expresscard that is connected to the seagate HD must be detected on boot (meaning the expresscards will allow the HD to be bootable)... only expresscard with JMicron chip is able to be bootable under mac os x 10.5. all other cards i hear are not able to work on boot.
2) this one i'm not so sure... but let's say we do get a bootable expresscard 34... assuming that you put the seagate HD drive in a eSATA external case... and connect it to the expresscard... this will not work in my opinion... because the firmware update will have to go through the external case's chipset... no way for the expresscard to have a direct connection without going through the external case's chipset... this is a guess because seagate is stating that we need to directly connect the drives to the motherboard esata port (for pc and mac pros).

i've thought about this for about a month... if your office/home is all laptop and no desktop... we are out of luck. NO WAY OF UPDATING FIRMWARE unless we take it to a mac pro or desktop pc with esata support.

February 05 2009 at 4:15 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Gary

Josh McCulloch said 4:05PM on 2-05-2009

Can anyone confirm whether an eSATA Express 34 card in an Intel MBP will work for updating the firmware?

Yes. I have that setup and it works. Apparently not all Express 34 cards are the same; the Sonnet Tempo card works. Get the .iso file, burn it to CD. Then connect and power up your drive enclosure. Then, restart from the CD. Your MBP will boot directly into FreeDOS (!) and you follow the instructions from there. At the end, the software tells you to power cycle the drive. Do this and...nothing. It just sits there. So what most people do is just reboot the CD, run the software again and when the drives are identified, you will see that the firmware is updated. There are some posts on this procedure over at MacinTouch in the January 26-27 time frame under the Seagate thread.

February 05 2009 at 5:16 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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