Hard Drive Update??

Mine didn't need it either...as per usual a distinct lack of information about what it does, what it's for etc...

It says my system doesn't need it either. So, who knows.

Hopefully Apple will provide more detail to let us know if we truly need this update or not.

I had two of the ST3500641AS, and now the firmware reports 3.BTE.

FYI, I had never ending hard drive failures on these two until I plugged the mac pro into a UPS. Under heavy i/o load it sounded as if the drives would just park and crash. I'd have to reinstall the o/s each time.

So it must have been a Seagate update then. It would have been nice if Apple had said so.

Both of my drives are Western Digital Drives.

I hope the update fixes your problems.

I guess that would be asking too much to have some disclosure instead of "you don't need to know" what or why, "just trust us."

I still wish I never applied EFI 1.2.

Use to recommend and warn people about buying or using Seagate, but maybe...
1) have to rerun this if you buy a Seagate drive?
2) it would patch the kernel or be delivered in another manner?
3) there was an issue with one of the Hitachi models over the last year
4) WD had to issue firmware updates for the RE/RE2 in January to deal with a problem

Actually have been a number of Seagate firmware related issues over the last 2-3 yrs.

The hard disk is dead after the update. What's wrong?

I thought I would link to my original discussion.

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=5266806

I'm also going crazy over hard drive troubles.
Two weeks ago my Mac started hanging intermittenly; requiring hard reboots.
After about 3 times; it wouldn't boot anymore at all. Booting from MacOSX DVD and running Disk Repair tool showed no mounted mac harddisk anymore; it couldn't be repaired. I ran Disk Warrior and was able to rebuild the drive but with many missing files; I could boot the Mac again (and most important files were in place), but many programs didn't work and neither USB or firewire or DVD-drive were working. I then restarted from the OSX DVD; and now Disk Utility showed my external firewire hard drive. I then wrote my entire disk image to the external hard-drive. As Leopard came out that day, I installed Leopard using erase and install, and recovered my files manually from my external HD disk image.

Everything seemed to work fine in Leopard afterwards.Time machine set up. A week later, iMac starts to hang again intermittently. Software update now shows the new hard-drive (firmware) update in my required updates. I try to install it on the sputtering Mac and it seemed to install (but had to force-quit some applications to reboot). During the rebooting process, the iMac hangs again, just keeps showing the spinning disk. Booting from OS 10.5 DVD, disk-utility shows my disk as mounted but cannot repair it.

This is driving me crazy. Best options now ?
- bring iMac in and ask for HD replacement
- re-install Mac from Time Machine backup ?
Another question: re-installing from time-machine allows only to restore full backup images (ie the first entire disk backup). Are you able to restore the later incremental backups afterwards ??

You have an iMac I take it (not a Mac Pro) and trouble with (beta OS that goes by the name "Leopard") which you might want to visit the Leopard 10.5 Lounge

http://discussions.apple.com/category.jspa?categoryID=235

There are tips for installation, but backup, reformat w/ zero the entire disk, and a fresh install with nothing else may be the best and only way to get to the bottom.

Don't use software that isn't 10.5 compliant and compatible.

Start your own thread if you have questions or it isn't identical to the original post.

If you search, you'll see Hard Drive Update is for some disk drives (Seagate on Mac Pro) to update the firmware on the drives (Seagate no longer provides end users with their firmware, and, there have been problems in the past with Seagate firmware on Macs incl. iMac G5s - "wake from sleep issue taking 90 seconds" a couple yrs ago).

I still think people should hold off on any new OS unless they are dare-devils, hardy, good at troubleshooting, like bleeding edge technology - and have a couple working backups.