Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

mcitaly

i have the same drive. i have a case open with Apple Care. Please do the same.
i'm waiting for them to find out how to rollback the firmware. also you will see the post from billyP he will be getting rolled back tomorrow morning and will clue us in on how to get the "geniuses" to rollback our EFI.

on the phone agian...

Message was edited by: iliveinyourhead

they still tell me to take it into a store leave it with them. oh well. i'll make my appointment now and hope for a billy's tech to come through and save the day.

I wondered if Apple used their own firmware on their stock drives. It is the only thing that makes sense, since by and large the stock drives seem to work with EFI 1.7. I wondered out loud about this on the thread a few days back, but the only comment was that as far as anyone knew, the stock drives were just standard EOM equipment and no different than off the shelf gear. Are you sure about this? It is the only logical explanation for the difference.

my ssd is working perfectly

mbp13 efi 1.7 booting in 15 seconds with Mail, Skype & Coolbook running

word 2008 opening in a blink of the eye compared to an eternity with the stock hd... such a difference... it's day and night

everything is perfect

no freeze, no beachball...

so happy ^^

Hey all, I just bought my uMBP a few weeks ago (2.26ghz,160gb hitachi) and foolishly updated to 1.7

I have two hard drives here - 250gb WD Scorpio Blue and 250gb Seagate Momentus 5400.4

I first tried the Scorpio but OSX installer would barely recognise it - sometimes it would but mostly it wouldn't. When it was recognised, disk utility would give an I/O error when trying to partition it.

Then I placed the Scorpio in a USB caddy and it's been working fine (it's now a Time Machine backup for the original 160gb stock drive).

After that I installed the Momentus and it was recognised and partitioned just fine. I then restored the TM backup onto this 250gb drive and it seems to be working fine. Having said that, I encountered a beachball or two (about 20 seconds followed by a bazillion Firefox tabs - I was being impatient and kept clicking!) and also no subsequent Time Machine backups are being performed. It would sit at the 'preparing backup' stage for around 10 minutes and when it started backing up (3MB total to backup) it was extremely slow (spent two minutes going from 12KB to 13KB).

I'm going to use the machine some more to see what happens, and will maybe try a clean install (my SL arrived this morning) to give it something more involved to chew on.

Regarding 3Gb/s and 1.5Gb/s, my Scorpio has no way (through jumpers at least) to force 1.5Gb/s but the Momentus does. If I get more beachballs and other problems I'm going to try forcing 1.5Gb/s and if that doesn't help, I'll try connecting the drive through the DVD drive's sata connection (apparently this helps, which could shed more light on the hard drive's very thin sata ribbon cable theory).

I was planning on arranging a visit to the Genius bar but as nkocharh has already pointed out, they appear to be of little help so I probably won't bother.

I've been wondering about something - there's an Apple firmware upgrade for their own Seagate Momentus 7200.4 drives that optionally ship with the larger uMBPs that may fix this problem, but I think it may be more to do with the clashing of the motion sensors in the laptop and hard drive itself (I think the updated firmware simply disables the drive's own sensor) and doubt it is meant to alleviate the problems associated with EFI 1.7 update but even so, I wonder if the firmware upgrade would flash a non-Apple Momentus 7200.4? Does anyone know?

If anyone's interested, I ran SMART Utility 2.0.2 for OSX and the hard drive is reported as 100% error-free so far (no retracts, CRC errors, nothing)

Thanks in advance, guys, hopefully they sort out this mess soon as it's causing me to hold out on getting a bigger hard drive for now

Jerry,

What is the year and model of your macbook? Which SSD do you have?

Thanks,
Shawn

Glad you enjoyed your SSD^^

I just installed mine (Intel SSD 80GB Gen2) yesterday and it is working flawlessly *finger crossed*.

Boot-up time ~13 seconds and it shuts off in less than 2sec.
All other application including Word, Page, iphoto etc opens in a blink.

Best purchase so far.
Hope everyone will get the freezing problems solved sooner rather than later.

A few pages ago, I posted that the problem went away for me when I did an archive-and-install of 10.5.8. That was on Aug. 29. As of today (Sept. 3), the problem has returned. I've made a new appointment with the Genius Bar at the Chandler AZ Apple store, referencing this thread.

A MacGenius at the Apple Store in Pentagon City was able to successfully roll back my firmware to 1.6. I will be using the computer tonight and will report if the spinning beach ball of death goes away.

That's funny.. my MacBook Pro is ALSO sitting at the Pentagon City Apple Store right now, and the Store Manager just told Apple Care they weren't sure if it could be done or not.. so hopefully mine will be done soon as well..Billy, do you know what Genius did it?

For anyone that was able to get the Genius to roll the firmware back can you please get them to give you a document ID or Article # they followed to complete the work.

So the rest of us can get this taken care of?

I think his name was Andrew? Not totally sure. Ask for Edward, though. He's not a Mac Genius, but he's the one who researched the issue and found the rollback tool. They should have a CD already burnt.

My case number was 134812208

Great.. I just got a call from Pat at the store, they're rolling mine back now, gonna call when it's done.

Message was edited by: MikeyUSC