I couldn't help but laugh at what an utter facepalm it would be if pre-firmware update you couldn't get it to fail, then post-update you couldn't get it to pass...
In that case, I think I'd rather not know it was passing beforehand...
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Samsung 2TB green drives defective firmware?
- Thread starter larrymoencurly
- Start date
I couldn't help but laugh at what an utter facepalm it would be if pre-firmware update you couldn't get it to fail, then post-update you couldn't get it to pass...
In that case, I think I'd rather not know it was passing beforehand...
drescherjm
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For me on one drive (not the one I updated) it failed every time with that "How to reproduce" test. I will retest tonight and post the results before and after the fix.
gotta love the consumer who ignores a companies' major screwup and goes on to order another 2 dozen of the affected drives before the company even issues a solid verifiable fix......
Cliff Couser
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Ran it as well. Did you simply get a ".....download is complete...." message after flashing?
They could have at least used the instruction "Firmware flashed succesfully"
drescherjm
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I would apply it. I guess if you are on windows and you have no software installed that checks the id of your drive you probably are safe. Note: Some software could do this as part of a licence check. I would not take that chance however.
drescherjm
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Ran it as well. Did you simply get a ".....download is complete...." message after flashing?
They could have at least used the instruction "Firmware flashed succesfully"
I do not remember the exact message but it was not very clear.
One thing to note since I had other hard drives. It appeared to only enumerate the first 3 or 4 drives so look carefully at the output if you have more than 1 of these drives. I know this because it returned something like skipping Intel SSD, skipping WDC 20 .. but not skipping Seagate 750GB ...
rofl.
Sorta like the idiots who ignore that wd has had tons of screw yous to all of us and keeps buying them. At least samsung seems to be trying to do it right by us.
drescherjm
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On my second samsung I ran the "How to reproduce" test 3 times before flashing and it failed all 3 times with 384 or 256 badblocks. I then updated the firmware. It actually updated the firmware a second time on the first drive. Anyways after a reboot back into linux. I could not get the drive to fail the test in 10 tries.
drescherjm
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Yes that was the message for both drives. Yes it appears if you add more drives then run flash it will try to reflash all F4s even though they already have been updated. This is probably due to the fact that the firmware version number did not change with this update.
trying is all that matters. who cares if the hardware is actually functional or the software is bug free, as long as their heart is in the right place.
you must be a salesmans wet dream.
trying is all that matters. who cares if the hardware is actually functional or the software is bug free, as long as their heart is in the right place.
you must be a salesmans wet dream.
Some days of the week, I can be. But really, I've had over 1000 HDD Purchases in the past 8 years for myself, family and customers. So far, Samsung has had 1 drive failure, and I think it had something to do with the dent in the frame assembly from the box being destroyed in shipping, just a hunch. Thats in roughly 200 drives in both 1TB and 500GB and a few times in raid 0 and 10 by customer request. Hitachi on the other hand, I've had around 10 in 200 drives come back for failures. Not so bad, but when my own personal drive also craps out for no reason, I tend to think twice. WD has only had issues with me once when I had a batch of 10 drives fail. But other then that, they've done decent by me and have had only those 10 drives fail in around 400 drives. They're out now because I dont feel the urge to deal with them turning off a feature in previous drives on the newer ones, just because they can. Seems like buying a new car with leather seats, coming back a week later for the same car, same price, but someone took out the damn seats all together.
Seagate on the other hand is horrendous. I've had at least 40 drives have issues between 30 straight failures and 10 that failed from RMA. 10% failure rate, not a chance I'll buy them until they figure out what turned them from half way decent drives to pure crap. Hitachi seems liked lately around this board, and one day soon I'll get 4 2TB drives to test, and maybe use them in the expansion to the system I'm building now.
So see, I'm not buying unrealistically here. I'm buying on my history with the manufacturer. Which is what people do when they buy the brand new car or computer part, they buy off the history with the brands. Dont just assume that because I've only been on the boards a week or 2 that my knowledge and experience is just a week or 2 in the making as well. Seems to me the hardware in this case is functional and the software seems to be bug free with this firmware update. I havent been able to reproduce the error since updating the firmware. And the bug never came up prior to my testing the bug once I had heard about it. If your waiting for that perfect hardware and perfect software to come around for everything you plan to buy, your going to wait a long time. No hardware or software is 100% perfect every time.
drescherjm
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You do not unzip the file. You just execute the application from the freedos prompt. And that means you need to boot into freedos.
I had the exact same problem. From another post I did last night (or early this morning, wanted to get it done before I went to bed):
First off on both PC's the new Samsung HD204UI is the only hard drive plugged in
I downloaded the file and made a MS-DOS boot floppy disk with WinXP and added the 181550HD204UI.EXE to it. Tried in 2nd PC (older P4 with SATA 1.5) and it didn't work with two different floppy's.
Then tried it with a USB boot drive then copied that over. This I tried on my main 2 year old PC (Abit IP35 Pro) and had USB boot first, showed the MS windows millennium dos boot and still nothing. Showed C:\> prompt [ brought up directory (dir) and the file was in C: ]
I noticed in the instructions it says extract the .exe file, well it didn't work in WinXP with UniExtract or 7-zip. Also downloaded file to Win7 laptop and that wouldn't extract with 7-zip. Kept getting errors and I downloaded it numerous times and checked MD5 hash and was same everytime, with IE and Firefox.
What am I missing? I just did a Asus P4G800-V bios update 5 days ago or so. That was a .exe download and I had to change it to a .rom extension and I tried that and that still didn't work with the floppy drive boot.
At A:\> I also tried just the HD204UI as is without the numbers before it. I have done firmware updates before, don't know what I'm missing. On the site it says the 181550HD204UI.EXE is the flash program so I should just need a dos bootable floppy disk or USB flash disc.
Please help what am I missing with this one? 5 hours past my bedtime, sorry might not make total sense.
Thanks for your time.
----
Response
Then my response:
Thanks for both of your comments. I did the FreeDOS bootable USB with UltraISO and it worked!!!
Thanks so much.
I can't believe the other methods weren't working. I even tried that HP_USB_Boot_Utility.exe method and of all of them I thought that would of worked.
After it was done, I turned off PC and pulled the drive right away and going to run the ESTool 3.01v and see if I get the RAM Error: AJ41.
Well actually I used 3.01p the other day, but if this passes then I'm thinking of getting another one at Micro Center since they are $90 now. Was thinking this weekend but 7-12+ inches of snow in Minneapolis !!! Have to check the weather, if that's really the case I can wait awhile
I hope I didn't screw up by pulling the hard drive after it was done and not letting it boot up again on the same motherboard, don't know why that would matter.
Never had so much trouble, I've done DVDRW's, CDROM's, MB's and a couple hard drives through the years, but felt like I've never done this before, or ever used a PC before. Both PC's MB's Bios's are easy to set first boot drives as FDD or USB-FDD....
Thanks again.
I still don't understand why they couldn't of made the firmware change, really stupid on their part. The only way to fully test it is to do a 6 hour test, crazy if you have multiple ones. What if someone only has one main PC? I do commend them on doing a fast fix though.
-------
How I did it in UltraISO, from my notes (well I think, I tried numerous ways and can't remember 100%)
On Asus Laptop Win7: However I had to put img file into top of UltraISO (extracted) and then I saved it. Then Went to _Bootable_ Menu and then Write Disc Image, it then found the img or iso I saved and it recognized the USB 2gb Flash Drive. It copied them over and then I copied the samsung flash firmware to 2gb Flash Drive and renamed to HD204UI.exe and booted up Abit Q6000 (Bios set to USB-FDD Boot 1st) and it worked.
Make sure to Physically TURN OFF your PC when you are done. Do NOT hit reset or Ctrl + Alt + Delete like it says.
---
Update: It took 9 hours but it fully passed the ESTool 3.01v Diagnostics .
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Relativistic
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Here's hoping that the new drives coming out of the manufacturing line will have new firmware numbers so that you know if they are bugged or not...
Does anyone know how to get the new patch to work on a PC, preferably by way of burning a bootable CD?
I have tried creating a DOS bootable CD with the Samsung .exe file added. I did this using MagicISO and the DOS 6.22 bootable iso. The result is that the Samsung .exe file was not visible after I booted under dos so I couldn't run it. I entered the "dir" function but the file wasn't visible even though it showed up in XP after I burned the CD. I changed the name of the file as well hoping that would help but it didn't.
I have a 4GB USB drive but nothing smaller. I couldn't figure out how to get the above ima file (http://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/?p=188) copied properly onto my USB as described above as I am not using Linux.
Alternatively if anyone or SB1 can explain in a little more detail how to do the USB boot option under windows that would be great.
Any ideas?
Thank you in advance.
I have tried creating a DOS bootable CD with the Samsung .exe file added. I did this using MagicISO and the DOS 6.22 bootable iso. The result is that the Samsung .exe file was not visible after I booted under dos so I couldn't run it. I entered the "dir" function but the file wasn't visible even though it showed up in XP after I burned the CD. I changed the name of the file as well hoping that would help but it didn't.
I have a 4GB USB drive but nothing smaller. I couldn't figure out how to get the above ima file (http://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/?p=188) copied properly onto my USB as described above as I am not using Linux.
Alternatively if anyone or SB1 can explain in a little more detail how to do the USB boot option under windows that would be great.
Any ideas?
Thank you in advance.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiRv_UKtk8I + that file should give you the proper concept... ultraiso like the previous user here did it. just copy the exe file into the iso prior to making the bootable usb or after making the usb stick itself, your choice. you can always do much the same with the original freedos full cd image at http://www.freedos.org/freedos/files/
Please disregard my previous post. After trying a second time using the USB method described above it worked just fine.
Just to add a little bit of detail for those of us who are not as experienced with UltraISO and using USB's as boot disks (I had never done this before) I have written the steps I took below which are based on SB1's post above.
Using UltraISO:
1. File/Open - the downloaded file(FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img.bz2) from this page (http://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/?p=188). Only command.com and kernel.sys files will show in the upper window.
2. File/Save As - (any file name).ima
3. Keep the active UltraISO session and window open
4. Bootable/Write Disc Image - choose your USB drive then click "Write"
5. Close the UltraISO session once it says it is complete
6. Go to Explorer and copy the Samsung patch file to the USB drive. I changed the file name to "Samsung.exe"
7. Reboot computer.
8. If needed adjust BIOS settings. I had to make three adjustments. - 1. Force USB to act/show as a FDD. 2 - make USB primary boot device over/replacing the floppy 3. Put the USB as the first boot device.
Once I did all of this and made the BIOS changes, I rebooted with the USB and then ran the Samsung.exe file.
The whole process was very very fast. It instantly ignored my 2 Hitachi and 1 WD drives (all 1GB) and found the Samsung. It said the following:
"now updaing code..."
then
"Download completed successfully"
I then turned off the computer as SB1 noted above and then I was done. I am going to run the ESTOOL now and see what happens.
Thanks to everyone for this help and also thanks to Samsung for coming up with a very quick fix.
Cheers!
Just to add a little bit of detail for those of us who are not as experienced with UltraISO and using USB's as boot disks (I had never done this before) I have written the steps I took below which are based on SB1's post above.
Using UltraISO:
1. File/Open - the downloaded file(FreeDOS-1.0-USB-Boot.img.bz2) from this page (http://derek.chezmarcotte.ca/?p=188). Only command.com and kernel.sys files will show in the upper window.
2. File/Save As - (any file name).ima
3. Keep the active UltraISO session and window open
4. Bootable/Write Disc Image - choose your USB drive then click "Write"
5. Close the UltraISO session once it says it is complete
6. Go to Explorer and copy the Samsung patch file to the USB drive. I changed the file name to "Samsung.exe"
7. Reboot computer.
8. If needed adjust BIOS settings. I had to make three adjustments. - 1. Force USB to act/show as a FDD. 2 - make USB primary boot device over/replacing the floppy 3. Put the USB as the first boot device.
Once I did all of this and made the BIOS changes, I rebooted with the USB and then ran the Samsung.exe file.
The whole process was very very fast. It instantly ignored my 2 Hitachi and 1 WD drives (all 1GB) and found the Samsung. It said the following:
"now updaing code..."
then
"Download completed successfully"
I then turned off the computer as SB1 noted above and then I was done. I am going to run the ESTOOL now and see what happens.
Thanks to everyone for this help and also thanks to Samsung for coming up with a very quick fix.
Cheers!
And if your BIOS does not have such an option?
Hi folks. My 2TB Samsung is connected to my XP PC using an eSata dock. When I tried to upgrade the firmware it said that it couldn't upgrade because it required an ATA interface. My PC is old and doesn't have any SATA connections. Is there anyway to still upgrade my HDD?
Flintstone
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This thread was news to me today. And it explains a lot. I have 16 TB of data on 10 of these disks on ZFS. They've been ok - but I've had "a few" random errors that I scrubbed away. This might give me the peace of mind I need to be able to sell or re-use my old 15 odd disks and trust the Samsungs.
My experience is that out of the 16 TB data only 1-2 mb total was repaired when using Solaris 11 Express. But this might explain why Nexenta gave me a lot of problems (theory: might have routines that does the command on a shedule).
I will apply the fix to all my disks soon and report back.
My experience is that out of the 16 TB data only 1-2 mb total was repaired when using Solaris 11 Express. But this might explain why Nexenta gave me a lot of problems (theory: might have routines that does the command on a shedule).
I will apply the fix to all my disks soon and report back.
TheEndangeredSpecie
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Good to see Samsung got a patch out quickly. I plan on picking up a few of these very soon. It does bother me that every company is having some sort of issue with their hard drives or at least seems that way.
drescherjm
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Your best bet is to gain access on some other pc if you can. Other than that you will probably have to purchase a $14 SATA1 controller.
If all I use the drive for is storage and streaming of video files, do I need to upgrade the firmware?
Exactly what I was thinking. Awesome and thanks for providing the instructions, but this still doesn't work for me. I don't have a floppy drive anymore either. I have a few 16GB flash drives and some smaller 512MB SD cards and readers around though.
drescherjm
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You may be able to get away with not upgrading for a while. Just make sure when writing that you have no software running is checking the SMART or more specifically no software reads the drive ID. Software license checks can look at the drive ID at random so this could be a potential danger.
drescherjm
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Do you have a CD or DVD drive that is bootable? I am sorry if that was discussed above I did not read every post.
Pardon the potential laziness suggested here, but if everything's publicly available, can anyone build a bootable DVD/CD (preferably DVD) ISO that we can just easily burn?
(I do admit I'm probably already making this more complicated than it is anyway. But I've never done a bootable USB anything, and I've already sunk a few failboats in the past at making bootable DVDs.)
I've bought seven of the drives already, but still don't have a fileserver put together completely, so not really in a hurry to fix my drives.
That said, I can follow most instructions out there on the 'net probably a good 90% of the time. So, if CD/DVD instructions were already posted and easy-as-pie to do, then I'll copy that to my notes for a later date. (Later being in the next few weeks, though.)
Sweet, I finally got it to work. I did it on my 512MB SD Card reader though. I think it will work the same on any flash drive though.
I got all the way to the DOS screen. I didn't change anything in BIOS to recognize as FDD btw.
1. Push enter twice to get past the dates it asks you for.
(I made my file F4.exe on the card/flash drive.)
2. I typed in dir *.exe to get a list of the exe I could run
( for some reason it changed my file name to F4EXE~1 )
3. I typed F4EXE~1 in and whallla
4. The drives are flashed
5. SHUT DOWN PC
For anyone having trouble creating a bootable FreeDOS USB flash drive, you might try UNetbootin:
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
It can create bootable USB flash drives for a lot of different things, and one of the choices is FreeDOS.
After you create the FreeDOS flash drive, just copy the Samsung exectuable to the root directory of the flash drive. When you boot from FreeDOS, you will need to type C: to get to the Samsung executable that you copied.
http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/
It can create bootable USB flash drives for a lot of different things, and one of the choices is FreeDOS.
After you create the FreeDOS flash drive, just copy the Samsung exectuable to the root directory of the flash drive. When you boot from FreeDOS, you will need to type C: to get to the Samsung executable that you copied.
I just finished running one full cycle of the surface testing using the ESTOOL 3.01v.
It took 5 hours, 25 minutes to complete the full cycle. In the end there were zero errors! So, yes I can confirm that the new patch appears to solve the problem.
I am a happy man
BTW, Samsung has released their own alignment tool which can be found here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_aft.html
It uses Acronis software and is only applicable for people who created the partition in XP.
It took 5 hours, 25 minutes to complete the full cycle. In the end there were zero errors! So, yes I can confirm that the new patch appears to solve the problem.
I am a happy man
BTW, Samsung has released their own alignment tool which can be found here:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/support/downloads/support_in_aft.html
It uses Acronis software and is only applicable for people who created the partition in XP.
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drescherjm
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I would do that but I am not sure it would be legal. I could also post the freedos disk image I created with firmware on the disk image again if it was legal.
An ultimate boot cd with a USB stick with the file on it would probably work. I did not test that. Otherwise its pretty easy to add files to the cd.
http://ultimatebootcd.com/download.html
Freedos also has an iso which may work again with a usb stick containing the firmware.
Flintstone
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Installed new firmware on all my 10 F4s now. Easy enough to do (moved two & two disks from my server to another system - thank god for tool-less LianLi cases and RaidZ2!), and I hope this solves everything, as I've had a bad feeling about the errors that occured ever since I bought the drives.
Now just a looong scrub ahead again...
132G scanned out of 17.4T at 431M/s, 12h14m to go
Now just a looong scrub ahead again...
132G scanned out of 17.4T at 431M/s, 12h14m to go
Flintstone
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I am suprised this subject isn't more debated. My scrub completed with a few expected errors (made before the firmware was applied). I expect no more errors from now on - so I'll report back when this is confirmed (I'll probably do a new scrub in a few days)
I encurage EVERYONE who has one or more of these disks to upgrade! Silent data corruption without a robust filesystem like ZFS is no joke! Even with ZFS it's _not_ a fun thing.
I encurage EVERYONE who has one or more of these disks to upgrade! Silent data corruption without a robust filesystem like ZFS is no joke! Even with ZFS it's _not_ a fun thing.
Flintstone
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Sure. This was after last nights scan (I use a out-of-the-box Solaris 11 Express with no extra SMART tools). I guess it had maybe ~0.5 TB write change since last scrub (and clear). The result was far worse when using Nexenta (I'm sure I had smartmontools installed there). I moved to Solaris since I thought Nexenta was the cause of the problems.
Code:
~$ zpool status bowl
pool: bowl
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices has experienced an unrecoverable error. An
attempt was made to correct the error. Applications are unaffected.
action: Determine if the device needs to be replaced, and clear the errors
using 'zpool clear' or replace the device with 'zpool replace'.
see: http://www.sun.com/msg/ZFS-8000-9P
scan: scrub repaired 96K in 11h23m with 0 errors on Mon Dec 13 11:25:03 2010
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
bowl ONLINE 0 0 0
raidz2-0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c10t3d0 ONLINE 0 0 2
c10t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 1
c10t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 2
c10t5d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c10t6d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c10t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c10t4d0 ONLINE 0 0 1
c9t2d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c9t0d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
c9t1d0 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errorsI will try to force-write a few gigs in the next days and do another scan.
I noticed this thread last night and am going to update my drives later. I think the firmware file has been updated since I checked last night, although it could have just been renamed.
I have four of these drives in a RAID array. Does anyone know if the firmware on all the drives will be updated at the same time or do I need to plug each into the primary as per the readme? I'm assuming the readme is inaccurate as IMHO primary / slave is only relevant for IDE and not SATA.
Cheers
I have four of these drives in a RAID array. Does anyone know if the firmware on all the drives will be updated at the same time or do I need to plug each into the primary as per the readme? I'm assuming the readme is inaccurate as IMHO primary / slave is only relevant for IDE and not SATA.
Cheers