zack84a Posted December 3, 2010 Share Posted December 3, 2010 Zack84a I will have to try that, can you post some instructions on how you pulled it off. I actually did it months ago, so I don't remember the exact steps.. I do remember I pulled my unraid flash drive, and set boot to usb cd-rom. From there I followed the instructions that was posted earlier in this thread. It is very very likely that you will have to force the upgrade (ie escape out of the initial menu), and force it to update the drive via the command you give it. I don't remember having to doing anything funky or at of the ordinary to accomplish it. If you have any trouble let me know and I can get it setup again to see if there was anything special to get it to work. Quote Link to comment
mifronte Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 For those who are forcing their newly acquired ST32000542AS drives to firmware CC35, are your drives made in China? Just asking since last month I forced a ST32000542AS made in China to C35 and it failed preclear and so I had to RMA it. I also purchased two ST32000542AS drives for $69.99 from NewEgg during the recent Black Friday sale and they both just passed preclear. Now I am debating whether or not to force the firmware to C35 and then running preclear again. I also have a ST31000520AS (1TB) with CC32 firmware and another ST32000542AS (made in China) with CC34 with data in my unRAID. I am just debating if I should update the firmware to CC35 too. Quote Link to comment
ohlwiler Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I have ten Seagate 2T. LPs, including 3 from Newegg on BF. I upgraded the firmware to CC35 on all of them with no failures. Sorry, I don't know the country of origin, but I bet several were from China. Quote Link to comment
queeg Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I've recieved 5 this week from two vendors: Newegg and TigerDirect. All 5 have been from china and I forced the firmware upgrade on all 5. The first has passed preclear and has been my parity drive for a few days. The second has passed and the 3rd is being precleared now. The only think I noticed so far is that since changing out the parity drive I've see choppy transfers when copying files to the array. In my attempt to check the network connection I installed a second nic and a different cable but the transfer is still choppy. Quote Link to comment
Loch Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I've recieved 5 this week from two vendors: Newegg and TigerDirect. All 5 have been from china and I forced the firmware upgrade on all 5. The first has passed preclear and has been my parity drive for a few days. The second has passed and the 3rd is being precleared now. The only think I noticed so far is that since changing out the parity drive I've see choppy transfers when copying files to the array. In my attempt to check the network connection I installed a second nic and a different cable but the transfer is still choppy. My transfers have looked like that for a while, but I am still on 4.5.4 I believe (waiting for 4.6final). I thought I read somewhere not to worry about it, but if it is abnormal, I'm right with you. Quote Link to comment
dyrewolfe Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I bought 2 of these (Made in China, both came loaded with CC34 and forced an upgrade to CC35 without issue). Both have been pre-cleared and I'm at the point of adding them to the array. However, I have a problem with one of them. One of the drives is slightly larger than the other and all my other 2TB drives, including parity: Parity: WD2001FASS 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #1: 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #2: 1,953,514,552 Of course, unRAID (4.5.6) doesn't like that #2 being larger than the parity. Anything I can do here besides swapping it for the parity drive? I really don't want to go that route. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I bought 2 of these (Made in China, both came loaded with CC34 and forced an upgrade to CC35 without issue). Both have been pre-cleared and I'm at the point of adding them to the array. However, I have a problem with one of them. One of the drives is slightly larger than the other and all my other 2TB drives, including parity: Parity: WD2001FASS 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #1: 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #2: 1,953,514,552 Of course, unRAID (4.5.6) doesn't like that #2 being larger than the parity. Anything I can do here besides swapping it for the parity drive? I really don't want to go that route. Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard? I'm guessing you do. (or connected the drive to one when clearing it) Check out "HPA" in the wiki. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA You probably have an issue to deal with in your BIOS configuration and all your disks that appear a tiny bit smaller have a host-protected-area defined. This is basically a time-bomb waiting to hit you when you least need complications. (as when replacing a failed drive) Many with an older BIOS that does not have the HPA feature disabled by default have replaced their motherboard. Others were able to upgrade the BIOS. Joe L. Quote Link to comment
dyrewolfe Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I bought 2 of these (Made in China, both came loaded with CC34 and forced an upgrade to CC35 without issue). Both have been pre-cleared and I'm at the point of adding them to the array. However, I have a problem with one of them. One of the drives is slightly larger than the other and all my other 2TB drives, including parity: Parity: WD2001FASS 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #1: 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #2: 1,953,514,552 Of course, unRAID (4.5.6) doesn't like that #2 being larger than the parity. Anything I can do here besides swapping it for the parity drive? I really don't want to go that route. Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard? I'm guessing you do. (or connected the drive to one when clearing it) Check out "HPA" in the wiki. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA You probably have an issue to deal with in your BIOS configuration and all your disks that appear a tiny bit smaller have a host-protected-area defined. This is basically a time-bomb waiting to hit you when you least need complications. (as when replacing a failed drive) Many with an older BIOS that does not have the HPA feature disabled by default have replaced their motherboard. Others were able to upgrade the BIOS. Joe L. Joe, that's correct. I do have a Gigabyte m57sli-s4 rev 1 board using the F15D BIOS. The parity drive is connected directly to the motherboard while these two particular Seagates are connected to a Rosewill RC-218 HBA (Marvell 88SX7042 chipset). I don't see a way to enable/disable HPA in the BIOS. After rebooting and looking at the syslog, I can confirm HPA is active on 3 of my 4 2TB drives. This board has lots of quirks when it comes to storage so it looks like it might be time for a new motherboard. Thanks! Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 I bought 2 of these (Made in China, both came loaded with CC34 and forced an upgrade to CC35 without issue). Both have been pre-cleared and I'm at the point of adding them to the array. However, I have a problem with one of them. One of the drives is slightly larger than the other and all my other 2TB drives, including parity: Parity: WD2001FASS 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #1: 1,953,513,496 ST32000542AS #2: 1,953,514,552 Of course, unRAID (4.5.6) doesn't like that #2 being larger than the parity. Anything I can do here besides swapping it for the parity drive? I really don't want to go that route. Do you have a Gigabyte motherboard? I'm guessing you do. (or connected the drive to one when clearing it) Check out "HPA" in the wiki. http://lime-technology.com/wiki/index.php?title=UnRAID_Topical_Index#HPA You probably have an issue to deal with in your BIOS configuration and all your disks that appear a tiny bit smaller have a host-protected-area defined. This is basically a time-bomb waiting to hit you when you least need complications. (as when replacing a failed drive) Many with an older BIOS that does not have the HPA feature disabled by default have replaced their motherboard. Others were able to upgrade the BIOS. Joe L. Joe, that's correct. I do have a Gigabyte m57sli-s4 rev 1 board using the F15D BIOS. The parity drive is connected directly to the motherboard while these two particular Seagates are connected to a Rosewill RC-218 HBA (Marvell 88SX7042 chipset). I don't see a way to enable/disable HPA in the BIOS. After rebooting and looking at the syslog, I can confirm HPA is active on 3 of my 4 2TB drives. This board has lots of quirks when it comes to storage so it looks like it might be time for a new motherboard. Thanks! Check for a BIOS update first... might save you a bit of work in swapping out the motherboard. If you do go through the process of removing the HPA do it one drive at a time, let that one disk get re-constructed, then once parity is re-established, do the next disk in turn. If you try to do it to multiple disks at once the array will not start as they will all be detected as different disks. Joe L. Quote Link to comment
dyrewolfe Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 Joe, I'm at the latest BIOS. Even with enabling the advanced settings page (CTRL-F1) there doesn't seem to be a way to disable HPA. From my quick research, this should only be a problem if HPA is on the parity drive. So should it be safe enough to move the parity drive to a higher port on the board (currently on the first port) and move one of my other HPA'd drives in it's place? Therefore, HPA is found by the BIOS and the other drives shouldn't be touched. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 Joe, I'm at the latest BIOS. Even with enabling the advanced settings page (CTRL-F1) there doesn't seem to be a way to disable HPA. From my quick research, this should only be a problem if HPA is on the parity drive. So should it be safe enough to move the parity drive to a higher port on the board (currently on the first port) and move one of my other HPA'd drives in it's place? Therefore, HPA is found by the BIOS and the other drives shouldn't be touched. It is a problem no matter which drive it is on. You can swap the drives for now, but look for a different motherboard. The problem arrives when a disk it is currently detecting the HPA dies and it decides to put one on a different drive. To unRAID you then have a failed drive AND another different drive... effectively a two drive failure and the array will not start. Joe L. Quote Link to comment
Joe L. Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 One idea to let you use the new drive is to set its HPA yourself using the hdparm -N command. That will make it the same (smaller) size as the existing drives. then you can use it anywhere. It will be about 2 Meg smaller... but that is not very significant. Quote Link to comment
dyrewolfe Posted December 4, 2010 Share Posted December 4, 2010 Thanks Joe. That's a good idea. I appreciate all your help. Looks like I'll be shopping for a new board sooner rather than later. And at least for this weekend, I'll explore my options on what I can do for now. Quote Link to comment
Mopar_Mudder Posted December 6, 2010 Share Posted December 6, 2010 Is HPA only a problem with Gigabyte boards? My Unraid has a BIOSTAR TA785G3HD and the computer I will use for updating the Bios is an Asus P5Q-EM Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted December 6, 2010 Share Posted December 6, 2010 Is HPA only a problem with Gigabyte boards? My Unraid has a BIOSTAR TA785G3HD and the computer I will use for updating the Bios is an Asus P5Q-EM As far as I know, yes. I believe there are some Asus boards that also have HPA options, but they are never turned on by default so they aren't a problem. Quote Link to comment
queeg Posted December 6, 2010 Share Posted December 6, 2010 Is HPA only a problem with Gigabyte boards? My Unraid has a BIOSTAR TA785G3HD and the computer I will use for updating the Bios is an Asus P5Q-EM As far as I know, yes. I believe there are some Asus boards that also have HPA options, but they are never turned on by default so they aren't a problem. Yes, gigabyte are the only boards with the problem. There are no Asus boards that have the problem. Quote Link to comment
queeg Posted December 6, 2010 Share Posted December 6, 2010 I'm seeing read speeds on my new drives that are fantastic during the preclear. Quote Link to comment
Bags Posted December 11, 2010 Share Posted December 11, 2010 This updating firmware is turning into a hassle. I only have sata on my unraid server which only has ver 4.6 and nothing else. I don't have a cd or dvd drive in the box. All my other computers are mac or ide. I have an external blue ray burner in a vantec enclosure connected by usb 2.0. I tried to burn the iso and connect it using the blue ray burner but it doesn't appear the bios sees it. Im guessing its because there are no drivers installed? The usb keyboard shows up. Short of buying a sata card to put in my old ide box anyone have any other ideas? Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted December 11, 2010 Share Posted December 11, 2010 Maybe burn the firmware ISO to a flash drive and boot from that? You'll have to use one of the utilities that makes the flash drive behave like a CD, not just place the ISO on the flash drive. Quote Link to comment
Bags Posted December 11, 2010 Share Posted December 11, 2010 um. OK I will try to figure it out. Quote Link to comment
Rajahal Posted December 11, 2010 Share Posted December 11, 2010 Here's one of the aforementioned utilities: unetbootin Quote Link to comment
CTD4X4 Posted December 12, 2010 Share Posted December 12, 2010 I successfully updated the firmware on my drives. Thanks for the walk threw . In the process of preclearing now. Quote Link to comment
Loch Posted December 12, 2010 Share Posted December 12, 2010 Flashed mine no problem. Passed 2 pre_clears and it building parity currently. It's a good 2-5 degrees cooler than any of the other drives in there. Quote Link to comment
kaiguy Posted December 14, 2010 Share Posted December 14, 2010 In the event there were others like me that didn't have an optical drive in their unRAID server and didn't want to or couldn't move the drive to another machine to update the firmware... I picked up this external CD-ROM from Amazon, less than $12: http://www.amazon.com/External-Slim-CD-ROM-Drive-Black/dp/B001B1796U/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1292287589&sr=8-3 Worked fine on my already-in-use disk. Though, like everyone else, I did have to force the flash. I noticed the software was dated in February 2010, so my guess is until they release another firmware version, you'll definitely have to force it for this model. Quote Link to comment
Bags Posted December 17, 2010 Share Posted December 17, 2010 I have to be doing something wrong since everyone else seems to not have a problem updating their drives. Maybe I am not choosing the right settings in image burn software. I dl the iso file to the desktop then copied it to the cd. What is the correct settings to choose in image burn. Quote Link to comment
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