Seagate SN06 firmware for the Seagate Barracuda ES.2

Seagate's KB says that you need to email discsupport@seagate.com to request a firmware upgrade if your drive is on a release earlier than SN06. Whether they can provide a version that will run under Mac OS X I don't know.

I found the SN06 firmware updater in 1 minute with Google, and I am sure others can as well.

Intel Mac Pro's (and apparently Macbooks with eSATA) can boot the ISO CD into FreeDOS and update the firmware. PPC macs, no such luck. Buy a cheap PC and take it back to Best Buy afterwards is one option, yes I know, how terrible. OK buy a PC from and return it to the same retailer that sold you all these bum drives.

NB the Seagate serial number checker is online and actually works and all my ES.2 drives said no need to upgrade but I did anyway. Also one of two 7200.11 drives had no S/N problem (the one from Singapore vs. Thailand), but I did them too , to SD1A firmware.

Did you flash your drives in the Mac Pro?

If you did what was the prompt that FreeDos booted into?

Mine was InitDisk followed by DriveInit errors ...

Thanks ... Ken

Hi,
I just did it after burning the ISO in the CD.
While booting I got the first call to initDisk, where it provided way to skip some loading (like config.sys and so on)... I didn't do anything, I left it run normally.
After few seconds it was showing me the readme file automatically.
I pressed F10 to quit the view and it gave me the prompt to load the firmware for 750GB and 1000GB disks (this image was working for both sizes).
I chose my disk size, then the system searched and recognized my disk properly (I checked and it did display my disk's S/N and model properly, including notice that I had SN05 on it).
Then it started uploading the firmware and finally it asked to power cycle the PC for proper finalization.
I did press enter and it shutdown the MacPro.
I then restarted with only that disk inserted and again the FreeDos sequence came up.
I shut it down again (I think it was unnecessary) and I proceeded re-installing all the other HDD in their original locations.
Booted from MacOs X and all was perfect (at least I hope this SN06 will fix forever the issue).

Hopefully you will get into this same point.
Cheers,
Armando.

Thanks for the rundown.

After the InitDisk prompt and ~30sec it gives me the "InitDiskError at sector 00 disk 0" over and over.

Maybe someone else has an idea?

Thanks Again ... Ken

Hi Ken,
just one more thing that was said already...
When you do this do you make sure all disk have been removed, but the Seagate AND the Seagate is placed on Bay1 where usually there is the system disk?

It looks like in your case the system can not use the virtual disk that is created after the booting.
I have seen the FreeDOS running on a C: disk during the loading phase of all the modules it needed.

Regards,
Armando.

The drive is in bay 1 with no other drives.

What do you mean by:
It looks like in your case the system can not use the virtual disk that is created after the booting.

and:
I have seen the FreeDOS running on a C: disk during the loading phase of all the modules it needed.

Thanks for the information ... ken

Well, obviously I don’t know for sure, but by reading your error message, it looks like the system is not able to load the remaining portion of code to start working.
Now, when I succeeded booting from CD, I saw the system reporting that it was working like from a "C:" disk (like on DOS/Windows system, the system drive usually) and from there it was loading some of the system scripts (like config.sys and so on).
Now as I don’t think the system creates any data or temporary disk assignment on the attached Seagate disk, I think the only way is that it creates this environment on memory. May be in your case there is something preventing FreeDOS from creating this "C:" disk. I don’t know which kind of disk you have, but if it is the ST31000340NS (or the 750GB but NS series ES.2) I can send you the SN06 ISO that I downloaded, just to see if it’s the same you got.
It did work for me and apparently we do have the same machine (MacPro).

Regards,
Armando.

Thanks again for the info.

My drives are:

Seagate 7200.11 s/N 5QJ0FYTK ; FW SD15
ST31000340AS P/N 9BX158-303 Date Code 08442

Seagate 7200.11 s/N 5QJ0APYT ; FW SD15
ST31000340AS P/N 9BX158-303 Date Code 08366

SN06 is not the correct one.

I have downloaded 3 times and even burned in Toast once ... Same DriveDetectError errors.

Thanks Again ... Ken

Ok then, your disks are different than mine.

The only other thing that comes to my mind, is that in my case and for the other person who was reporting success on this issue, we both had our disks still working before we attemped to update the firmware.
I don't know if it is your same situation or if this has any relevance with regard to your problem.
I don't know what else to say.

Regards,
Armando.

Thanks anyway.

The disks are working.

Maybe someone else has an idea ... ken

Do you have multiple hard drives installed? If so, perhaps remove all except one of them and do them one at a time. Something else that comes to mind is perhaps you have a bad sector in the boot block of your drive. After backing up your drive, maybe try zero formatting it to remap any bad sectors as unusable. (not sure if boot sectors effect firmware though. you might want to search online for it.)

Thanks for trying.
I do one drive at a time in bay 1.

I will try a zeroing out and format next.

Thanks ... Ken

accarda wrote:
Well, obviously I don’t know for sure, but by reading your error message, it looks like the system is not able to load the remaining portion of code to start working.
Now, when I succeeded booting from CD, I saw the system reporting that it was working like from a "C:" disk (like on DOS/Windows system, the system drive usually) and from there it was loading some of the system scripts (like config.sys and so on).

If you watch it boot which does go pretty quick it creates a RAMdisk and is running from RAM , it does not use the hard drive at all during the process. I cannot imagine the RAM use is more than 100K or so, remember DOS without HIMEM ran in under 640K for all operations.

I cannot understand his issues, though the Seagate forums may be a better place to look. I did 6 drives of three different types and the whole booting up to the installer was hands free other than F10 after the blurb to dismiss the blurb after it booted, and then to select the few menu items.