{"id":613,"date":"2021-02-09T20:21:58","date_gmt":"2021-02-09T19:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/?p=613"},"modified":"2021-02-09T20:26:26","modified_gmt":"2021-02-09T19:26:26","slug":"samsung-2tb-ecogreen-f4-hd204ui-firmware-upgrade-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/en\/2021\/02\/samsung-2tb-ecogreen-f4-hd204ui-firmware-upgrade-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Samsung 2TB Ecogreen F4 HD204UI firmware-Upgrade"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Wow, that was a real fight. You get quite a nice hard disk with the 2TB Samsung Spin Point EcoGreen F4<\/a> (bang-for-the-buck-wise). Unfortunately, patching the firmware is anything but a walk in the park. Here is the experience I could gather in the process – scraping all necessary information from different places on the net. (thanks pixelr0n1n for the hints on how to get this stuff done on a Mac Pro – see comment section<\/a> below) So let’s get started:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The drive has a firmware bug<\/a> which causes the hard disk to just \u201cforget\u201d to write data if you enable the write cache (which you probably want to do) if there’s a SMART-command sent to the disk at the same time.<\/li>\n
  2. On Samsung’s web page, there’s a tool to patch your disk up to the latest firmware.<\/a> Sounds great and pretty easy. But:\n
      \n
    1. The old and the new firmware have exactly the same version number. I don’t know any procedure to tell a broken firmware from a good one – but to run a stress-test, e.g. copy a large file and issue a SMART-command, say using smartmontools. Do a byte-compare afterwards (the writes do not fail with an error, but silently screw up your data while [not] writing it to disk).<\/li>\n
    2. If you have a disk manufactured after 12-2010, you can be sure that the firmware is ok. That date is printed on the disk label.<\/li>\n
    3. That’s an FAQ: flashing the new firmware does not erase your data. However: If you used that disk already, you cannot be sure that all data on that disk is ok. Additionally, having a backup of your data never hurt anyone. Not<\/em> having one did.<\/li>\n
    4. You can <\/em>write the firmware-update to a disk twice. No use, but possible.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/li>\n
    5. So go ahead and grab a FreeDOS-Iso<\/a> (Update: <\/strong>Quadzilla posted a link<\/a> to an ISO which already contains the Samsung tool!). Using isomaster<\/a> (if you use  Linux, it’s free – you can also modify the iso in a virtual machine), put the F4EG.EXE into the iso image. Just dump it into the top level of that image. You cannot easily put it into the FreeDOS floppy disk image, I tried that, because I ran into some nasty problems with the FreeDOS CD-ROM drivers. If you want to boot FreeDOS as a \u201cLive CD\u201d, it won’t easily recognize SATA-CD-ROMs. Or other brands of CD-ROMs. If you use the right mode while booting FreeDOS, that’s no problem. See below!<\/li>\n
    6. Now, grab a PC (we Mac users have a problem here, you cannot use SATA-USB converters neither for flashing). The PC should not use any SATA-PATA emulation layer (if it does, you have to disable it in the BIOS settings, otherwise, F4EG will yield an \u201cinternal error\u201d while flashing – and won’t write the firmware<\/em>! I also came across a machine where you couldn’t disable this emulation – if you’re one of this lucky clan, look for a different PC).<\/li>\n
    7. Now for the fun part:\"\"<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
        \n
      1. \n
        \n
          \n
        1. <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

           <\/p>\n

            \n
          1. boot FreeDOS by choosing 1:
            \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
          2. Next, do not<\/strong> choose Live CD only, which might work if you have the right CD-ROM and FreeDOS supports it. Instead, choose \u201cInstall\u201d, option 1:
            \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
          3. Choose your language:
            \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
          4. \u2026and next, chicken out to the prompt (before FreeDOS does something nasty with its fdisk). Now, your CD will be mounted as drive X:
            \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
          5. Now, change to drive X: and launch F4EG. It will inform you when all went ok.
            \"\"<\/a>\"\"<\/a><\/li>\n
          6. Now: switch off your PC. If you just do a reset, you will not be running the new firmware!<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

            Veeery easy. Yes. If you know what you have to do after what with which tool and with the right hardware\u2026 I hope this helps a few of you. If you feel as adventurous as I did when I bought the Samsung disks (which run fine now, btw!).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

            Wow, that was a real fight. You get quite a nice hard disk with the 2TB Samsung Spin Point EcoGreen F4 (bang-for-the-buck-wise). Unfortunately, patching the firmware is anything but a walk in the park. Here is the experience I could gather in the process – scraping all necessary information from different places on the net. (thanks pixelr0n1n […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-613","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nicht-kategorisiert-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":618,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613\/revisions\/618"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.joerg-seyfried.de\/alt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}