jhnjay@gmail.com wrote:

> So does anyone know how to force flash it?


I'm not saying it's totally impossible but not likely.

It's been a few years so going on memory, the problem is a die mask in the
prom (eprom) of the drive.

I sort of went down the same path a few years ago when I obtained some ebay
specials, a couple of A5200's and a box of fc drives, think mostly pulls
from EMC cabinets. These mostly worked but because there were so many
different firmware revisions (non Sun), there were plenty of bus resets and
other problems which made it impractical to do anything with them.

After a bunch of research I beleive the problem that couldn't be worked
around was in the prom used on the drive that held the firmware, the first
16 or 32 bytes was a die mask that isn't erased when the firmware was
loaded. It's sort of manufactured in, write once.

Naturally this small area is where the drives ID comes from, including who
owns the drive (sun, emc, ibm).

Using that seagate software mentioned before along with the appropriate pc
(it'll never work on a sun) and fc or scsi card, you can force load the
firmware overriding the check, but you'll just end up with a drive that
becomes "not ready".

One of the last things I remember was looking at the chip itself, it seems
certain versions of them can be 100% reprogrammed including that first part
of it, but was sort of a waving a chicken around your head while reciting
some voodoo prayer to get it done. The main problem was the chip on the
drives I had were house numbered, so was difficult to determine if they had
that full erase function or not.

The absolutely last thing from that project was going back and forth with
some guy in email about finding something in the firmware code that was
checking the map area of that non-eraseable portion and simply skipping over
it. Makes sense but never heard an outcome.

If you are really wanting to spend the time (and are somewhat of a hardware
hacker), surprisingly Seagate has on line (or at least used to) pretty much
every little dirty secret about firmware you'll want to know. These are
(were?) in the white paper area, where all the general engineering technical
manuals are. Explains in detail the flashing, reprogramming, erasure of the
firmware along with all those timing charts that give you a headache.

I'm just saying to find a software solution is not likely to be found, I
really don't think the drive can simply be "reloaded" with different
firmware unless it was built to do so. Once Sun, IBM, Hitachi gets their
hands on it, even if Seagate built it, it isn't theirs anymore.

Likely the most practical solution is to find the "real" Sun drive, get a
full dump of the prom via some sort of reader then order up the fully open
prom blanks and burn those. Whip out the soldering iron and volia, you have
a clone. Much easier to say than do but is possible in theory.

I really don't think any of this was intended to be super secret or an
attempt to protect the firmware code, was done mostly to prevent someone
from making 50 pounds of paperweight via a keystroke by sending the wrong
update to a cabinet.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com