Detecting drive identity

As if it weren't enough that the firmware for the ScreenPlay Pro HD has problems, now it turns out that the OEM drive they are using from Seagate may also have problems. Apparently sometimes the drive will, without warning, decide to stop booting due to a bug in the drive's firmware.

The drive found in many ScreenPlay Pro HD units is a Seagate drive model ST31000340AS. This model and several others have the bad firmware. Seagate has complete instructions on their web site for detecting and updating the firmware on the drive.

But we have a couple of problems. Their utilities only work if the drive is directly connected to a SATA port on the system. And if you take apart your ScreenPlay Pro HD to mount the drive on your computer, you void your warranty.

There is now a utility for detecting what firmware and drive is in your ScreenPlay Pro HD.

This utility will not void your warranty, because it is not changing anything on your drive, only reading from it. However, the utility must run on the drive itself, which requires running the telnet utility with the drive connected to the network.

The following instructions assume you have you have no familiarity with Linux, but general familiarity with Windows XP or Vista.

If you are using Vista, you will need to enable Telnet (Go to Start –&gt;&gt; Control Panel –&gt;&gt; Programs and features –&gt;&gt; Turn Windows features on or off).

To find the IP address of your Screen Play Pro HD..........

1. Download the identify.zip file from this site.

2. Extract the identify file from the identify.zip and put it in the bottom level directory, the \  directory of your media player. You do not need to extract the identify.c file. It is the source code from which identify was built and is for people who have a mipsel toolchain and can compile it themselves.

3. In explorer, right click on the media player drive and select disconnect if you have a drive mapped to it.

4. Open a telnet session prompt

5. Start -&gt;&gt; Run -&gt;&gt; telnet 192.168.1.1 (replace the IP with your drive's IP address)

When you run the identify program, you will get a dump of the /proc/ide/ide0/identify translated from hexadecimal format into character format. In character format, you'll see a lot of "garbage" characters mixed in with the important information. You will see something like this:

?7►? 9ABCDEFG♦SD15   ST31000340AS                            Ç►/@☻☻ ¬d┤@@!m░tpm░tp☻☺@☺P&lt;♠&lt;i╝☺A#►dd■■■m░tpP┼

The 9ABCDEFG characters are the serial number. The SD15 is the firmware version, and the ST31000340AS is the drive model.

You can submit the serial number on the website, but unfortunately all you will get is information telling you it is an OEM drive and to contact the device manufacturer.

If desired, you can try to apply the Seagate firmware fix yourself.