Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Thanks for letting me know. I guess it wasn't counting the freezes as major problems reading from the drive.

Ill give some more feedback on my experiences with the rollback, I have the unibody with integrated battery. Came from the factory with 1.7. Crucial 256 MB SSD. After doing the rollback disk utility could see the drive (couldn't before), tried doing an install and with leopard/snowleopard it fails after a while. As I am not doing anything with this very expensive paperweight, and to make sure it isn't a faulty drive, I took out the SSD put it in a USB enclosure and installed snowleopard on it. Installed perfectly, no problems using it as boot device and doing multiple reads/writes. I then took the SSD put it back in, the laptop boots but beachballs all over the place (still with the roll'd back firmware). It's unusable. I tried doing the 1.7 Firmware upgrade and the laptop doesn't boot, the drive is not recognized. With the stock SATA that came with the laptop everything works fine. I really hate that this top of the line laptop can't be upgraded. Even with the rollback I am having problems. I put the SSD in a one of the older first run unibodies and everything works perfectly.

i would suggest getting your logic board swapped.

Agreed, ideas on how to position that with apple support? I can't send it in with my SSD, and it works fine with the stock drive

Hi Fishbert,

I was wondering if you have tried the second upgrade to EFI 1.7 ?

I have been on this thread since page 3 and went through the hard yards with Apple Support in over 8 calls for close to 2 months. As much as I am disgusted with the response received things are working now for 3 days.

1) You are right in what you said about logic board replacements. The Apple specialist has made a comment that their internal document on this issue states that logic boards can not be replaced for this issue anymore since the downgrade utility exists. If you are lucky you probably can get it still done in an authorized repair center which is not fully aware of the corporate guideline rather than an Apple Store.
2) Clearly Snow Leopard was not a fix to this issue as I had tried that.
3) It is a fact that there is working hardware out there with EFI 1.7 as I have one now.

There factually are only three possibilities now:
1) Given what I went through it is possible that the issue might be caused by issues during the EFI firmware upgrade. In retrospect, I remember that I power cycled the Macbook the first time as it seemingly was stuck in a Black screen for a while, after which the Macbook restarted and did the upgrade anyway.
2) As my logic board was replaced a hardware respin of the Logic Board on Apple's behalf can not be ruled out.
3) I had the Flat Ribbon replaced as well as it seemed slightly dented/bent which given the flimsy nature might or might not have impaired communications between the drive and the controller.

Besides that I don't think there are any other possibilities given the fact that I had the issue and now they are gone. And trust me, I am not a n00b

Ollie.

You can now downgrade.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=729883&page=13

So I had fun during the past week trying to upgrade to Snow Leopard by obtaining a new WD Scorpio Black 7200RPM 320GB drive and installing SL on it. I did this with the drive connected thru an external USB enclosure, and it installed just fine and worked great. Then I put the drive in the Macbook Pro and embarked on this educational experience. Upon bootup I got the Apple-Folder-?, but eventually it came up (sort of) after I let it sit for 2 hours booting up. So I eventually got the OS/X desktop, but when I tried to open an application it took way too long and I gave up. I tried using the SL CD's Disk Utility to check the disk, but the verification took forever, many many hours.

I naturally assumed the drive was bad, got another one, and voila, this drive doesn't work inside the machine either. I was able to partition it, but the install just hung for hours at "28 minutes remaining". So then I tried to erase the partition's data using DiskUtility, but it returned a "File System Formatter Failed" error.

During this ordeal I've been running the laptop from the original hard drive installed in an external USB enclosure. Interestingly, a persistent spinning pinwheel problem I had with simply running Firefox has gone away completely, even with a huge load on the machine (2 VMs in Fusion, Xcode, iTunes, Firefox with dozens of tabs open playing many movies simultaneously to stress the machine). To me it seems like my spinning pinwheel and the bad firmware/logic boards are correlated issues. Here's my thread on the pinwheel:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=10137615#10137615

My other 2 year old white macbook with only 2GB of RAM performs better than my brand new macbook pro... this is majorly frustrating and disappointing.

I need the upgraded drive, and I need the persistent spinning pinwheel to go away. If the problem is really with my logic board and not just an EFI firmware issue, and if they will not replace my logic board, then I'm going to be one unhappy camper.

fishbert wrote:
Apple has apparently said that they do not ship 3.0 Gb/s drives \[...\]

Hmmm... But how about the 500GB Seagate in my machine? It was supplied by Apple as part of my CTO uMBP 15" order. I don't think it's jumpered to 1.5 b/c after I patched to EFI 1.7 the interface was reported to be running at 3Gbps. So I think Apple do ship 3.0Gbps drives.

BTW - 3 days now after rolling back to 1.6, lots of heavy use, and no beachballs at all. Id' say re-applying 1.6 has absolutely fixed the issue I was experiencing.

nico-apple wrote:

fishbert wrote:
Apple has apparently said that they do not ship 3.0 Gb/s drives \[...\]

Hmmm... But how about the 500GB Seagate in my machine? It was supplied by Apple as part of my CTO uMBP 15" order. I don't think it's jumpered to 1.5 b/c after I patched to EFI 1.7 the interface was reported to be running at 3Gbps. So I think Apple do ship 3.0Gbps drives.

The interface itself will report 3GB/s with 1.7 installed, regardless if the drive is jumpered to 1.5 or not. (Mine does anyways with a Hitachi locked down to 1.5G)

Are you on EFI firmware 1.7 or 1.6?

I have a WD Scorpio Blue and I had a similar problem with 1.7 (drive mostly unrecognised, when it was recognised it would not format or partition at all and the computer would sit around at bootup for ages) but it's running 100% perfectly with 1.6 and that includes restoring my stock drive's Leopard backup to it with all the data and also a clean install of Snow Leopard. I've also copied over 145gb of data from my old laptop without so much as a hiccup.

After suffering badly from this issue I had my logic board replaced to downgrade the firmware. Following the public release of the downgrade tool and the report from Oliver I re-installed 1.7 and it completely cooked my SSD, system freezes aplenty. I then used the downgrade tool and all is well again.

My advice - if you get your system working on 1.6 wait for 1.8 before upgrading. With 1.6 it takes 15 seconds from when I press the power button to when my login apps have launched so there's no speed increase to be had from 1.7 and it will probably break your system again.

Just reporting this in case Oliver is tempting anyone to try.

hey bilals. I'm on EFI 1.7. I've made an appointment to downgrade to 1.6. Once I do this I'll update this thread with my experience and whether I am rid of the SPOD (spinning pinwheel of death).

Hopefully 1.8 will come out soon and people can experiment with it and see if it works with the 3rd party drives.

On a related note, given that 1.6 limits the SATA interface to 1.5Gbps, is there still any advantage to be had with a 7200RPM drive compared to 5400RPM, or is SATA-1.5Gbps a bottleneck?

eriksj wrote:
On a related note, given that 1.6 limits the SATA interface to 1.5Gbps, is there still any advantage to be had with a 7200RPM drive compared to 5400RPM, or is SATA-1.5Gbps a bottleneck?

Definitely. 7200RPM does not come close to the limit.

Oliver F wrote:
Hi Fishbert,

I was wondering if you have tried the second upgrade to EFI 1.7 ?

I have been on this thread since page 3 and went through the hard yards with Apple Support in over 8 calls for close to 2 months. As much as I am disgusted with the response received things are working now for 3 days.

There factually are only three possibilities now:
1) Given what I went through it is possible that the issue might be caused by issues during the EFI firmware upgrade. In retrospect, I remember that I power cycled the Macbook the first time as it seemingly was stuck in a Black screen for a while, after which the Macbook restarted and did the upgrade anyway.
2) As my logic board was replaced a hardware respin of the Logic Board on Apple's behalf can not be ruled out.
3) I had the Flat Ribbon replaced as well as it seemed slightly dented/bent which given the flimsy nature might or might not have impaired communications between the drive and the controller.

Besides that I don't think there are any other possibilities given the fact that I had the issue and now they are gone. And trust me, I am not a n00b

I have not tried a second EFI 1.7 upgrade. There are a few reasons... I haven't had time to look into it, there isn't really a benefit for me (yet) with no SSD, I'd hate for something to go wrong (I'm pretty far from a newbie myself, but a borked firmware installation can be messy, and if it happens in Apple's hands, they are responsible to fix it... if it happens in my hands, that's a problem), it doesn't solve the bigger problem of there not being a real and official fix, etc.

Maybe I will look into it more one of these days, but maybe not.

bobrudge wrote:
My advice - if you get your system working on 1.6 wait for 1.8 before upgrading.

eriksj wrote:
Hopefully 1.8 will come out soon and people can experiment with it and see if it works with the 3rd party drives.

Waiting for a version 1.8 is all well and good... if one comes.
Apple has still not acknowledged this issue, much less said anything about fixing it. So we may be waiting a very long time for a version 1.8. Heck, if one arrives, it may not even address this issue - maybe it'll make the battery more efficient or change the fan speed logic or something else that's completely unrelated. When the only "solution" is to downgrade firmware, you are effectively frozen in time when future updates are made available, unless they address that specific issue... and no such promises have been made.

This is where I lead into the need for people to make noise about the unacceptable SATA II problems with these laptops.

1) Call Apple Support -- if you've already called them, call again and ask if there's been any progress toward a solution.
2) Leave feedback at Apple's http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html page.
3) Write Apple-centric news outlets (macrumors, appleinsider, tuaw, arstechnica/apple, macnn, etc.).
4) Warn others to stay away from this hardware line until a real solution is available.

Don't just wait for a version 1.8 that may or may not come. Make some noise about this serious and widespread problem. Apple said they would fix the click/beep issue when that thread hit around 70 pages... this one is already past 80, and so far we've heard absolutely nothing from Apple, and very little from the Apple press.