Firmware upgrade on Barracuda III/IV ATA drives?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Colin Bigam
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Colin Bigam

Hey all;

I've got a couple of 20GB Barracudas (st320011a and st320414a respectively)
that came from surplus (i.e. fried) Sun Ultra10s.

These drives check out fine on a Sun, can be seen properly by my bios, but
under no circumstances can they be seen as more than 8GB drives by Win2k or
WinXP! They will, however, appear as 20GB drives in DOS/Linux/Win95/98.

I've heard that for the 9-20GB IDE drives, Sun had a custom firmware. The
firmware on these drives, according to the sticker on them, is 3.19. The
questions I have then, are these:

1) Can I upgrade the firmware from 3.19 to...?
2) Will this fix my problem?
3) If so, where can I get this firmware?
4) Am I missing something here?

Thanks, all!
Colin
 
Colin Bigam said:
Hey all;

I've got a couple of 20GB Barracudas (st320011a and st320414a respectively)
that came from surplus (i.e. fried) Sun Ultra10s.

These drives check out fine on a Sun, can be seen properly by my bios, but
under no circumstances can they be seen as more than 8GB drives by Win2k or
WinXP! They will, however, appear as 20GB drives in DOS/Linux/Win95/98.

I've heard that for the 9-20GB IDE drives, Sun had a custom firmware. The
firmware on these drives, according to the sticker on them, is 3.19. The
questions I have then, are these:

1) Can I upgrade the firmware from 3.19 to...?
2) Will this fix my problem?
3) If so, where can I get this firmware?
4) Am I missing something here?
Click to expand...

Alternate capacity jumpers?

Or run IBM's Feature Tool. http://www.hgst.com/support/index.html
 
Folkert Rienstra said:
Alternate capacity jumpers?
Click to expand...

Already checked it, and then tried installing a jumper just to test. Nothing
worked.
Or run IBM's Feature Tool. http://www.hgst.com/support/index.html
Click to expand...

Will this work on Seagate drives? I'd be surprised if it did, but who
knows?

Oh, I almost forgot in my original message. I downloaded Seagate's "disk
wizard," and formatted a 20GB NTFS partition. Win95/98 saw it as a 20GB
NTFS partition, as did the Seagate wizard itself. When I tried to install
Win2k/SP4 or WinXP on it, it claimed that I had a damaged 20GB partition
on an 8GB drive.

Thanks again,
Colin
 
Colin Bigam said:
Already checked it, and then tried installing a jumper just to test. Nothing
worked.


Will this work on Seagate drives?
Click to expand...

Of course not, I always send people on wild goose chases.
I'd be surprised if it did, but who knows?
Click to expand...

Yes, who knows, it might even blow up in your face.
We wouldn't want that, now would we.
 
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