Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Do this.

Make an appointment online to see a genius. In the notes field include a link to this forum thread and that you need your 1.7 firmware rolled back to 1.6 due to issues with your 3rd party drive. You can also mention that the genius supervisor Has access to this rollback utility.

There is no charge. Yes you can take it to any Apple Store. Just a note which may or may not affect you. I was in the same situation. Bought with 1.7. Had the same Seagate drive you have now. The rollback did make things much better but still had the pauses but not nearly as bad. I replaced the 5400 with the 7200 version and everything is working fine now. The 5400 was in an earlier Unibody MacBook for 8 months before I got the new 15" MBP and worked fine. I would love to hear back from you once you do the rollback.

Good Luck and happy rollback.

Cheers, John.

Thanks John for your reply. Did you try doing a clean install with the 5400 drive after the roll back?

I just got off the phone with Apple Care. The representative said that he does not see how the firmware update has anything to do with the problem, and that we should get a hard drive through a Apple certified vendor and have them install it to remedy the problem. Not exactly the answers I was looking for. Will try to get the roll back done, and do a reinstall and see how that goes.

While I'm sure we're all happy that your experience has turned out to be positive, if the machine will not pick up the drive at all during boot, no OS will help in the matter. The issue has everything to do with how the hardware controllers work with the drive and present itself to the OS than the other way around.

Like Fishbert, I've been without the ability to use any of a number of my Intel X25 SSD drives since the 1.7 update. In fact, I just popped the case to see if I would get "luck" this time around while installing 10.6. Of course, no such luck. My MBP 15" doesn't even see the drive (or two others as well) for Leopard to install.

All drives work just fine in other machines as well as an external USB enclosure connected directly to this MBP. Long of the short, those os us who can't even get a drive to be recognized are limited to the stock drive we purchased until either a "fix" is released, we take the unit back or "get over it".

I, for one, am over it. Of course, I won't purchase any of these units for my company until the trust level if back.

We're all in this together. Tempers flare, but lets be civil about what we're trying to accomplish. Now, if only Apple would make some sort of statement. Being in the dark is worse than being told "no".

When your MBP can't see the drive to install on, can you see the drive if you open disk utility on that install page. I know there is an issue with the Crucial SSDs that can be fixed this way - you can see the drive in Disk Utility, partition it there and then when you exit DU the system will allow you to install on it.

Hi Oceanfurl,

I did do an archive and install to see if it would help but did not bother trying a clean because the it runs fine in an external controller, USB and Firewire. I have been doing this a long time and can tell when it is hardware or software pretty much. I went ahead and got the 7200 version because I wanted the faster speed anyways. If I still had an issue with it I was going to return it for a new machine.

As for Applecare, do not bother on this issue. Just follow my advice with the genius appointment and I am sure you will be fine. Putting the info in the notes will give the tech time to research and get the rollback util, I hope.

I had a great tech that had the cd burned and all ready to go under the counter when I went. Hopefully your visit will be just as smooth.

Good Luck

Cheers, John.

I tried dropping by my nearest Apple Store today after making a Genius Bar appointment to try and get my firmware rolled back, and they hadn't heard of this issue. The supervisor wasn't in for the day, so I didn't have an opportunity to check if that avenue would have panned out.

The somewhat irritating thing is that I've been having this issue for some time, but I'm not even using a 3rd party drive. I did a custom order for a 320 GB drive, and it turns out to be one that supports 3 Gb/s SATA (FUJITSU MJA2320BH FFS G1). I don't see any utilities provided by Fujitsu to bump the max speed down to 1.5 Gb/s.

I suppose I'll try again at the Apple Store when the supervisor is in?

I had the same experience as you today, jbsnyder. Apple Store in Chandler, AZ (suburb of Phoenix). I've had the problem for about a month, with the stock 500 GB Hitachi drive. I was hoping to get the firmware rolled back, but was told they hadn't heard of such a process for EFI 1.7.

For what it is worth, I did an archive-and-install of 10.5.7 (upgraded to 10.5.8) about 24 hours ago. No problems since then. That's the best stretch I've had since this problem appeared - better than I get from safe booting + PRAM reset, which usually gives just a few hours of relief. When I told this to the person at the Genius Bar, she said their experience is that many of the mid-2009 MBPs have wonky OS X installations that give weird behavior that is resolved by an archive-and-install. I'm hoping that's true in my case, although I'm not holding my breath.

Anbar wrote:
I had the same experience as you today, jbsnyder. Apple Store in Chandler, AZ (suburb of Phoenix). I've had the problem for about a month, with the stock 500 GB Hitachi drive. I was hoping to get the firmware rolled back, but was told they hadn't heard of such a process for EFI 1.7.

You should have them call the Tucson store... that's where I had my rollback done.

Count me in the same boat. Trip to the genius bar, no rollback tool (despite fact that I referenced it in reservation) and 90 minutes of familiarizing them with the issue and this thread before they came up to speed and ultimately threw up their hands. I've been lurking here since June keeping the faith that Apple would get this fixed but I'm about out of patience here. 5 Macs in the house but have never experienced this lack of responsiveness from Apple. Have tried 3 Sata2 compliant drives with no luck. I'd even pay Apple to provide a larger capacity drive that would work at this point. If they aren't proactively pushing the firmware downgrade tool to the genius bars how high a priority can this be for Apple. Any assumptions on the number of people experiencing this issue as a percentage of sales based on this thread? End of vent!

That stinks. If it helps, the Tech's name at the Mall of Georgia store was Jon. He never hear of it either but asked his supervisor. They each have a logon and access to certain utilities. Jon said his supervisor had it in his but had not pushed it to any if his techs yet. If it helps call fishberts or my store. Hopeully it will get you farther.

Cheers, John.

PitchBlank wrote:
Right, but the random 30-second beachball freezes occur on the June 2009 MBP 17" as well (mine included, and several 17" owners are reporting the same issue in other threads). It never had 1.5 Gbit/s SATA speed at any point, thus never received the 1.7 EFI Firmware update, it retains the ExpressCard slot and the discrete 9600M GPU. So it must be something else. And it's not limited to certain hard drives (I have the stock Hitachi 5400 RPM 500GB), it's simply more noticable with the Seagate 7200 RPM because it used to click and beep up until a recent firmware update.

Right now I'm not having the beachball issue (it plagued me up until this morning), and that's due to any of the following... A) I performed an SMC reset, B) I performed a PRAM/NVRAM reset, and C) I switched from 9400M to 9600M, or D) it simply goes away for a while after a reboot. I'll see if it crops up later.

I have the same configuration as you and would be interested to hear if you end up getting the beachballs again. I've made the switch from 9400M to 9600M but as yet haven't done an SMC reset or zapped the PRAM.

Absolutely ludicrous for Apple customers to have to troubleshoot their hardware for them. Particularly when the product line is so thin.

How exactly do you check your firmware etc?

I was planning on buying a Seagate 7200 RPM 500GB drive and installing, but this topic has scared me away?!

Thanks for the tip, fishbert! I will stick that in the notes to the "Geniuses" in Chandler if/when the problem reappears.

My freshly installed 10.5.8 continues to work smooth-as-silk despite my usual hard use (lots of sleeping and waking, network access, and HD access via Safari + constant email use). I haven't read through all the pages of this thread, but I presume that some others have tried to archive-and-install after the EFI-related problems appeared and have gotten no relief? And hence that the problem is likely to reappear on my now-blissful system?

Regardless, I've gotta say that archive-and-install turns out to be a surprisingly painless process, and everything now seems snappier. This is the first time I tried it despite years of owning OS X Macs! I always just upgraded before, or did a full erase and restore. Doing an archive-and-install a couple of times a year to clean out crud suddenly seems like a reasonable idea. Off topic, I know...

Picked up 10.6 at the store today. Trying to decide if/when I should give that a whirl. I'm longing for iCal to be able to talk directly to my Exchange server...

just ordered the X25 postville, will probably get it in 2 days

i'll keep u posted

I took my MPB 15" to the Apple Store in Ann Arbor yesterday. They did not seem aware of the EFI 1.7 issue. It had been two months since I first reported it. My guess is that this issue must be fairly rare. Anyway, they could not find a software tool to roll back the firmware. I told them about how someone in a Georgia store had that done. I hope I recalled that right from this thread.

They will be doing a mainboard replacement. The tech did not seem to think that there could be a hardware failure, but an incompatibility was most likely. He also expected (or hoped?) that the replacement board would have EFI 1.6 on it.

I'll report the result here.