[rescue] Seagate firmware

[Mike Katchabaw]

Hi!

Recently, a group on our campus received from Compaq several cabinets
full of goodies, including two large storage arrays.  For our help in
receiving and moving these things around, we were given several of the
hard drives out of the array.  They were very nice SCSI disks, Seagate
Barracuda 4LP's (model ST34371n) - 4 GB, 7200 RPM.

As always, there's a catch.  A few days ago, we heard from the group
that received this lot of hardware that none of their disks functioned
outside of the array -- after poking around they learned that Compaq
likely wiped the firmware on the disks and replaced it with firmware
to work in the RAID arrays.  After poking around, we seemed to verify
their conclusion.  The disks power up, will respond to a SCSI probe,
but will otherwise not respond to any other SCSI commands.

Is it possible to reflash the firmware on these disks to something
that will work outside a storage array?  The original firmware
labelled on the disks is numbered *0756*.  We looked into it and Sun
appears to provide firmware and tools to work with the wide version of
the drive (ST34371w) but not the narrow version we have.  Sadly,
Seagate does not have firmware or tools for their disk drives on their
web site (unless I missed it).  

I am in the middle of trying to reach Seagate technical support, but I
thought I would tap the experience here too.  Can we flash the
firmware on these drives?  Where would we get the software and
firmware to do so?  Does anyone have a contact within Seagate that can
help us out?

If anyone has any thoughts or ideas, your help is greatly appreciated!

Many thanks in advance!

Mike.
(katchab at csd.uwo.ca)