HavocXphere
Honorary Master
So after battling with this for hours, I want to preserve what I learned for the benefit of others.
Seagate harddisk firmware updates come in 2 flavours: Windows based and CDR images.
Don't use the Windows ones. They mess with the MBR so they can wreck you're OS install if something goes wrong. Or in my case it just gives a useless error message. So CDR version it is.
Use at own risk - This is not the official method. Data on the disk should remain intact, but make backups just in case.
1) Download the CDR ISO image for your firmware update. Links to find the right one:
( http://support.seagate.com/firmware/drive_config.html )
( https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/request.html?userPreferredLocaleCookie=en_US_ )
The 2nd page listed above is a bit fussy about capital letters in the serial numbers etc, so it might require a few tries (You get a message in red if it fails). The tool linked to on the first page can theoretically take you to the correct download page too, but that didn't work for me so I typed in the codes manually on the 2nd page.
2) Use Winrar to extract the contents of the ISO file (7zip should also work). You're looking for a .ima file inside the ISO - there should only be one of them.
3) Rename the .ima to .img
4) Download this tool to write the .img to a USB flash disk. This will overwrite anything on the flash. Take care to overwrite the correct drive letter.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
5) Reboot & go to your BIOS. Change AHCI to IDE
6) Boot off the flash & run the firmware update ... follow instructions in the update.
7) Set BIOS back to AHCI
8) Boot back into windows & use the tool from the 1st Seagate link (Step 1) to confirm that the firmware version is updated
9) Victory dance
....Exact same procedure for SeaTools, except you start with a different ISO and skip step 8.
Tried various other tricks like diskpart, unetbootin & batch file hacks - no joy.
Seagate harddisk firmware updates come in 2 flavours: Windows based and CDR images.
Don't use the Windows ones. They mess with the MBR so they can wreck you're OS install if something goes wrong. Or in my case it just gives a useless error message. So CDR version it is.
Use at own risk - This is not the official method. Data on the disk should remain intact, but make backups just in case.
1) Download the CDR ISO image for your firmware update. Links to find the right one:
( http://support.seagate.com/firmware/drive_config.html )
( https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/request.html?userPreferredLocaleCookie=en_US_ )
The 2nd page listed above is a bit fussy about capital letters in the serial numbers etc, so it might require a few tries (You get a message in red if it fails). The tool linked to on the first page can theoretically take you to the correct download page too, but that didn't work for me so I typed in the codes manually on the 2nd page.
2) Use Winrar to extract the contents of the ISO file (7zip should also work). You're looking for a .ima file inside the ISO - there should only be one of them.
3) Rename the .ima to .img
4) Download this tool to write the .img to a USB flash disk. This will overwrite anything on the flash. Take care to overwrite the correct drive letter.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/
5) Reboot & go to your BIOS. Change AHCI to IDE
6) Boot off the flash & run the firmware update ... follow instructions in the update.
7) Set BIOS back to AHCI
8) Boot back into windows & use the tool from the 1st Seagate link (Step 1) to confirm that the firmware version is updated
9) Victory dance
....Exact same procedure for SeaTools, except you start with a different ISO and skip step 8.
Tried various other tricks like diskpart, unetbootin & batch file hacks - no joy.
Last edited:
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