Hi, On Fri, 23.01.2009 at 21:28:34 +0000, Dieter <[email protected]> wrote: > Recovering from Seagate's problematic 7200.11 firmware.
first off, several other product lines are affected, too. In particular, the popular ES and ES.2 "server grade" disks are also affected, to the best of my knowledge. Seagate only admits to problems with ES.2 drives, not ES drives, though. > Seagate's response has been less than wonderful. We need > a FLOSS solution. Right. > We need for this to work with any flavor of Unix, We need to do this from within a running system. > We need for this to work on one drive without affecting > other drives. My first idea is that smartmontools probably provide much of the required framework alreaedy, and could possibly extended to work with this situation, too. > If Maxtorman is correct, then once the drive has been operating awhile, Seagate sent me the following link http://seagate.custkb.com/seagate/crm/selfservice/search.jsp?DocId=207931 which imho contributes to the impression of a less-than-stellar response by stating "Based on the low risk as determined by an analysis of actual field return data, Seagate believes that the affected drives can be used as is." (current as of _now_). > that works properly. Since Seagate's solution will require attaching > the drive to an x86 system and booting a FreeDOS ISO from CD, if the log > is at 320 that boot will brick the drive. As far as I understood, the firmware has a sort of a boot loader which reads the actual firmware from the drive, and also writes new firmware to the drive. This leads me to suspect that writing a modified boot loader firmware which does not contain such log entry reading or writing, could bypass the 'brickedness' caused by the broken firmware which is actually on the platters (ie, which is what the boot loader needs to load to begin with). So, if a modified boot loader would eg. abstain from loading the firmware on the drive, the corruption of said firmware on the drive would not occur, thus not blocking the remainder of the hardware. However, if, and how, such a new boot loader could be placed into the ???ROMs of the drive, I really don't know. > Once Seagate releases working firmware, we want to be able to install > it from Unix, on any CPU arch. Seagate's release can only install > on x86 using FreeDOS. -> smartmontools come to mind. > Is Maxtorman correct about the 320 log entries? My dealer told me a similar story, but I don't know where he had it from. Kind regards, --Toni++
