Forum:Manually installing firmware

Manually installing firmware. I have a screenplay pro HD on my workbench and it will not boot up. The blue light flashes, on the TV the loading wheel does not go past the 3o’clock position and the HDD sound like it is not spinning up properly.

The hard drive is a 1TB Seagate ST3500418AS firmware version CC44 and date code 09421. I have plugged the HDD into an external caddy and the drive spins up and I have recovered all the data from the NTFS partition.

With the HDD plugged into the screenplay and then connected to the pc via usb I have tried to re-flash the firmware but the firmware loader cannot see the device.

Is there a way of manually loading the firmware directly onto the HDD? I don’t mind having to format the disk I have the data backed up. My client would just like to have the device working again and would be happy to pay for a replacement hard drive rather than the whole device.
 * Sorry. Since my screenplay bit the dust and I can no longer do anything new on it, I don't check this forum very often.
 * The fact that the hard drive is accessible when directly plugged in through an external caddy suggests 1) firmware needs reinstalling, 2) the sectors where the firmware is located have gone bad, 3) bad connection to main screenplay, or 4) screenplay board is defective. Obviously you are asking for help on #1.  What I would suggest doing is getting a 1 TB or 512 GB spare drive you may have lying around, put it in and try the firmware update procedure, making sure you do this using a Windows XP machine.  It is known to work on XP, and this will eliminate possibilities 1, 2, 3, and also confirm that you are doing the procedure right.  Make sure you are booting it with the power button on the front console and not the remote.
 * You can also manually configure the file system using linux. The partitions are listed here.  I had to do this once to get mine recovered a long time ago.  I do not know of any way to manually install the firmware to partitions 1 & 2 from the image they provide.  If you happen to have another screenplay Pro HD then you could use a program to bit copy the sectors from the other one.  IomTools can unencrypt and decompress the firmware.  You could try creating an image from that, but that would be outside of the realm of what I could do and test without a screenplay, so you'd be on your own. --JCoug (talk) 17:16, July 1, 2013 (UTC)