Q: Firmware update and SATA II hard drive

Duh, how silly of me to jump on a possible solution without thinking. The restoration CD 1.6 idea was thrown around in an earlier post (page 10?) in this thread and it is already known to not be a solution.

@iyacyus, many of us in this thread have already had discussions with Apple Care, Apple Geniuses and other Apple Certified Repair Depots without luck. We are given the same "we don't support third-party drives" line. Some owners have gotten firmware rollbacks and others logic board replacements but they are a minority. The warranty does not cover third-party drives and Apple is not obliged to help us. We can only hope that they will regardless.

I have the described problems with the original HD in my MBP13, is this the same issue? I often have the beachball for at least 10s (but rather 30s), Music stopps and videos, too. I can switch between the apps with cmd+tab, but no one responses and all show the beachball.
Also I have the feeling that the longer the MBP runs, the more often this behaviour is noticeable. Additionaly it occurs to me that when I copy several files or download several large files, this effect is often noticeable.

And yeah, i have EFI 1.7 installed right after I got my Book in early July.
So the question for me, is this the same issue? Although I have the original 160GB Hitachi drive?!

Canadiandude wrote:
Duh, how silly of me to jump on a possible solution without thinking. The restoration CD 1.6 idea was thrown around in an earlier post (page 10?) in this thread and it is already known to not be a solution.

@iyacyus, many of us in this thread have already had discussions with Apple Care, Apple Geniuses and other Apple Certified Repair Depots without luck. We are given the same "we don't support third-party drives" line. Some owners have gotten firmware rollbacks and others logic board replacements but they are a minority. The warranty does not cover third-party drives and Apple is not obliged to help us. We can only hope that they will regardless.

Apple is obliged to fix the issue, because the problem does not lay with the hard drive, the problem is with the SATA II interface of the laptop. The evidence for this is that putting that same hard drive in an external enclosure connected over firewire/USB fixes everything. These are not hard drive failures, and the issue is observable across a wide variety of drives from a wide variety of manufacturers. What is more believable: all of those manufacturers' drives are the problem, or Apple's singular firmware on their singular logic board chipset is the problem?

Apple has been feeding people the "we don't support 3rd party hardware" line because it's a convenient 'get out of jail free' card to deny (what, pre-rollback tool, had been expensive) support. And now that a rollback tool exists, I'm concerned that Apple will view that as adequate support and not fix the issue properly.

Just because Apple says so, doesn't make it true. <Edited by Host> (seems people don't want me talking about legal options)

fishbert! We agree... Though I'm not sure what people can do if Apple's saying they will not support or fix it, accept to keep pushing the issue.

Tell Apple that you are having the problem intermittantly even with the stock drive. Point them in the direction of this thread and tell them you require a firmware downgrade or logic board replacement. Be persistant. It worked for me.

Fishbert, I agree with you. Apple should be obligated to fix this issue. My Macbook Pro will not recognize a third party drive when installed in the laptop. What happens a year from now (without AppleCare) or 3 years from now (with AppleCare) when my warranty expires and my hard drive dies? Am I supposed to shell out another $2000.00 for a whole new computer instead of replacing $100.00 part? That doesn't seem right.

iApfel, or anyone else with that file... please contact me at hiskid@gmail.com or mark@markuhde.com You would basically save my life. I need a working computer and Apple is far far far from here... the Apple Authorized Service Providers aren't allowed the rollback

Nevermind, I just realized that's the publicly available CD for old MBPs, not the right one at all.

Message was edited by: Markie

You know what guys, I got two MBP,
one is previous version which has Express Card in it. The other version has SD card.
I put the WD 500GB which got problem so called "Beach Ball" on my older MBP which has Express card slot, and it doesn't have any problem. I think the new MBP 's NVIDIA controller is different then the Express card version? And Apple try to force the controller to have 3.0G instead 1.5G ?

tungbh wrote:
You know what guys, I got two MBP,
one is previous version which has Express Card in it. The other version has SD card.
I put the WD 500GB which got problem so called "Beach Ball" on my older MBP which has Express card slot, and it doesn't have any problem. I think the new MBP 's NVIDIA controller is different then the Express card version? And Apple try to force the controller to have 3.0G instead 1.5G ?

The controller in both the 13" MacBook Pro (SD card slot) and the 17" MacBook Pro (Express card slot) unibody laptops is NVIDIA part number MCP79MXT-B3.

The controller is capable of 3.0Gb/s... Apple's 1.6 firmware is forcing it to be 1.5Gb/s (and Apple's 1.7 firmware is broken)

This whole thing is sickening. I have a brand new 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM SATA-II 3G drive sitting in a box that has Both Windows and Mac supported logo's on it. Boy is my face red knowing that I may have to either keep it as a souvenir, return it to the store and explain why, or just hold on to it and hope that this gets fixed.

Screwed up part is my prior macbook went thru a battery, Power supply, and tanked a hard disk in the first year I owned it. So much for build quality these days. My old IBook G4 12' is still kicking on ALL original parts. Wish we could get back to that level of confidence.

LOCK IT UP APPLE ... Put out a patch or step up and get us working gear!

Censey wrote:
LOCK IT UP APPLE ... Put out a patch or step up and get us working gear!

You know, it would be nice if they'd even just say "hey, we know about this and are looking into a fix." That'd make me happy (for now).

Turns out (after reinstalling OSX) that my problem was due to migrating my old user account from my iBook. It brought across some settings for applications that were no longer there, so boot up time was very slow.

I didn't migrate the old user this time, and it all works again.

I have the WD 500Gb Scorpio Blue, in a MBP 13", 2.26Ghz WITH EFI 1.7 firmware that works perfectly.

Hope that may help others with a similar issue.

Apple has removed their page about EFI 1.7.
You may see the search description on this page (at the bottom) - http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&q=efi%20update

But you can't go to that page, while you can find an article about 1.6 EFI update.
So they know about this problem, we have to wait.

Griffin9k wrote:
Apple has removed their page about EFI 1.7.
You may see the search description on this page (at the bottom) - http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&q=efi%20update

But you can't go to that page, while you can find an article about 1.6 EFI update.
So they know about this problem, we have to wait.
Griffin9k wrote:
Apple has removed their page about EFI 1.7.
You may see the search description on this page (at the bottom) - http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=search&q=efi%20update

But you can't go to that page, while you can find an article about 1.6 EFI update.
So they know about this problem, we have to wait.

You can still get it here though http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/firmware_hardware/macbookproefifirmw areupdate.html (linked from http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/apple/index1.html)

Do you know if they are still pushing the firmware through Software Update? That's a bit of a pet peeve of mine. 1.7 was supposed to "fix" the issue of the machines being in SATA 1.5 mode... even though Apple stated they have never used drives that support 3.0 mode. So the update was clearly only to support third party drives. Maybe after a week or so with all the problems that were immediately reported, they could have just pulled the firmware update. It wouldn't have had any impact on their stock drives... and third party drives would have worked just fine (albeit with some SSDs perhaps not reaching their full potential). If they had pulled the update, they could have saved themselves and lots of other people tons of grief. Fortunately I got my MBP before the new machines shipped with 1.7 so I've just hidden the update so I never have to see it. What I still don't understand is if they can enable 3.0 mode with a firmware update... they should be able to drop it back down to 1.5 mode with a firmware update. At least everyone would have a usable machine... and the vast majority of people will be fine with 1.5 mode. Granted, we all complained when they shipped the machines in 1.5 mode... Of course the expectation was that 1.7 would fix that (since that was its sole purpose) vs. breaking third party drive compatibility. I still have a stock drive in my machine and I'm afraid to "upgrade" to 1.7.