Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

23 and 24 close enough, so ollie the motherboard swap was a success with 1.7 correct?

you swapped motherboard and sata cable?

also if im swapping logic board and hard drive will this black sata cable be swapped also?

Message was edited by: Peter Di Arcangelo

Is there anybody with the same problem (beachballing/freezing) but on a MB (nor MBP)?

I "auto-updated" my MBP to EFI 1.7 and then later "rolled back" to 1.6 using the MacRumors file.

I couldn't see much performance difference at all with 1.6 and want to re-install the 1.7 EFI.

The EFi 1.7 firmware shows up in auto-update but when I run the auto-update it does download, extracts and then "writes files to the volume" but a few seconds later says that "the program was successfully installed" - without actually updating the firmware.

Any idea how I can go to 1.7? It says it has already been installed in the "installed update".

When I had the Motherboard swapped it came with 1.6 again.
To be accurate, there is no 1.6 for June 2009 MBP by the way, it was shipped with version MBP53.00AC.B00 and the 1.7 is MBP53.00AC.B03.

I did not re-upgrade to 1.7 for probably 8 weeks and bit the bullet to work with highly reduced SSD speeds (down by almost half in read and writes).

After giving up on Apple Support (or rather them giving up on solving my problem), and once I had the option to downgrade without hassle I did the upgrade again very carefully.

In regards to the Cable: As it seemed that the cable was slightly dented where it crossed over to the connector, I also asked my provider to swap the ribbon cable as well. It is a separate assembly and needed to be ordered separately.
The other reason was, that it seemed somehow plausible that the data path (either on the Motherboard, Connector or Cable was the culprit given that I experienced lots os UDMA CRC errors in the S.M.A.R.T tool.

Reinstalled Snow Leopard and zapped my PRAM. That set the graphics settings back to better battery life. Have a bunch of downloads going on right now, doing web browsing, watching a movie in Quicktime Player X, Preview, Pages, Mail, Photoshop CS4 and a bunch of other apps open. So far no HD stalling.

Neodymium wrote:
I bought a Runcore pro IV 256 SSD (Mac Edition) thinking I would be immune from the 1.7 problems as I revision 1.6 of the firmware. Alas after install all I get is a folder with a question mark. The odd thing is everything works fine when the SSD is connected as a USB device.

Any suggestions?

When I first booted up from my Intel SSD internally, I saw the Folder-with a question mark icon as well. I originally think I messed up, so I tried everything. I suddenly realize it maybe the start-up disk priority was messed up, so I press the option key when I turn the power on - and Viola, I can see the SSD there and can boot from it after since.

It may not be your answer - but it certainly solved mine. I updated SL to my original stock HDD then using SuperDuper to clone to the SSD via external enclosure. After I put it back inside, it could recognize the drive - and the above method solved it.

I solved this by downloading the EFI 1.7 installer as a stand alone from here:

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/firmware_hardware/macbookproefifirmw areupdate17.html

Hi Chai Man,

Have a look in Applications/Utilities. It's probably installed there. Double-klick it to start the upgrade itself.

Ollie.

Hi !

Do you use a 7200rpm in EFI1.6 ?

Oliver did the logicboard they replaced have 1.7 preinstalled or did it come with 1.6 preinstalled?

fishbert wrote:

Elisabeth Hogrefe wrote:
is this similar to the problem i'm having with my "new" (3 month old) mbp 13"? i get freezes and the beachball thinking thingy at random times. its frustrating because it happens several times an hour. i am careful to close open programs that i'm not using and this happens in the middle of things that usually don't require thinking such as scrolling down on a web page. i have no idea what caused it, its been happening for about a month or so now, but it seems to be getting worse. i have on occasion had to shut down my computer because it would totally freeze and become completely non-responsive and the only way around it was the power button.

Next time it freezes, be patient. Let it sit for 5 minutes, and see if it recovers. If it does recover, you may be seeing this issue. If it does not recover, what you see is probably a different problem.

I did exactly as you said -- my machine froze this morning. All background apps ceased functioning and only the mouse would move. I decided to go take a shower and get ready, then came back to the machine about 15 minutes later.

I was greeted by a laptop with its screen dim, no mouse movement whatsoever, and the fans spinning like crazy. I had to power off the machine and restart it.

APPLE FIX THIS *&^$% NOW!!!!!!!

OK..I was having similar problems and this thread threw me for a loop. Here is what solved MY problem.

I have a WD 500GB Scorpio Blue in my Macbook 13" Aluminum Body. All of a sudden I get hangs, etc. as described here. The fixes here..flushing params etc. nothing.
When I looked at SMART INFO it said Verified. This is where the twist came.

I finally took the machine to the retail store. They ran "their" SMART diags on it and said my HD was failing. In the end, this was the case and doing an RMA on the drive solved the hangs.

The problem is there is no good way that I see to really find this out from an end users standpoint. Disk Utils says all is well. I found out what the retail store was using for diags. It is SMART Utilty from VOLTANS. You can find it herein Apple Downloads: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/systemdiskutilities/smartutility.html Try it out and find out if your disk is failing as that was the cause of all my HANG problems.

I wish Apple would include a meaningful set of SMART disk diagnostics that would have shown this problem without all the messing around...it would have saved Apple money and me a lot of time and frustration.

Try it out....I hope this helps someone out there!! Let me know if it does here.

Just wanted to comment that I'm now running a June 2009 MacBook Pro 15", 2.8, with 1.7 firmware and the 120gb OCZ Vertex (1.3 Firmware) and all is moving very very smoothly thus far.

Simply took it out of the Late 08 UMP MBP 15 2.53 and dropped it into the new machine and it's worked flawlessly thus far.

Thanks for your response fishbert.... read-on

fishbert wrote:
My responses to your level 2 support guy...

RamAM wrote:
For what it's worth I just got off the phone with level 2 support at Apple. Guy was very nice but in the end told me that:

1 SATA II is not supported on apple macbook pros

Then why was a firmware update pushed out to the masses to enable SATA II speeds? Are you telling me that Apple pushed an update to my grandmother that specifically enables an unsupported or experimental interface standard by default?

In all fairness... if your grandmother installed her own HDD upgrade then she is not as tender a target as mine. If she didn't install her own HDD the point is moot.

2 While Apple must've known about this (see the EFI 1.7 release note) it is still not an officially recognized issue 'by us'

Ignorance is bliss, eh? (or at least cheap)

Cheap it is - in the short term. As it is not reasonable for them to not mention a known issue likely to affect a large percentage of their customers I think this will not end quietly.

3 I can try going to genuis bar for help - they might test against their own SSD

This is not support. This is "go away".

Fair - unless they know something they're not saying. In any case my MBP was manufactured June 2009 according to the decoder tool nearby in this thread.

Factory: W8 (Shanghai China); Production year: 2009;Production week: 25 (June); Production number: 280 (within this week)

4 Maybe I can find the same model SSD Apple sells

So you're saying that Apple crippled the capabilities of the 9400M chipset in order to sell more Apple drives? That's real shady, and possibly illegal anti-competitive behavior.

5 Apple doesn't support SATA II because it is new and not reliable enough for their premium systems as it is 'new technology'

This is the real kicker...

Yep.

a) Apple supported SATA II just fine in the 2008 MacBook Pros.

Unofficially?

b) Apple pushed an update to everyone that specifically enables SATA II by default on the current MacBook Pros.

With a release note that says 'we know it will not be good for some of you'

c) Apple specifically calls out 3.0 Gb/s SATA II support in the Mac Pro ... is this not a premium system? I'm sure all these industry professionals would be very interested to hear that their hard drive interface is not "reliable enough" for a premium Apple system.

Citation please! (no really, citation please)

d) Are you really trying to argue that Apple avoids new technology in their "premium" laptops?! Doesn't that, by default, make the line anything but "premium"?!?!
e) If SATA II is considered too "new", why does the SATA laptop hard drive selection at Newegg (a popular online computer components retailer) consist of 80% SATA II drives (40 SATA II drives, compared with 11 SATA I drives). That would seem to imply that SATA II is industry standard technology, not some new-fangled thing that still needs the bugs worked out of it (can anyone say Mini DisplayPort?).

Solid point

I have to imagine he didn't actually believe all of that... but I figured I'd share was I was told

If he did believe all that, he should be demoted as a level 2 support professional due to lack of understanding of subject material. If he did not believe all that, Apple's reputation for excellent customer service must be called into question due to his bald-faced lies to a "valued" customer.

I expect he was either lying about what he saw (this is not known) per his instructions, or the DB he dips into explicitly has it not listed to manage his response. Either way... lame.

I've got a Hitachi 500GB in mine and am having the intermittent lock ups. SMC and PRAM reset, per the Apple tech, did not solve it, nor did I think it would. Apple, do your part, please. If we can't have sata 2, then correct your mistake and move on but don't leave us hanging with brand new POS laptops.