[mythtv-users] WARNING: Samsung F4 owners / warning. Disable smartmontools

[John Drescher]

On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 8:29 AM, John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    > http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/smartmontools/wiki/SamsungF4EGBadBlocks
>>
>> The URL above now reports that [1] points at a firmware fix.  Assuming
>> you fight through the atrocious English, has anyone here tried the new
>> firmware?  (Gosh, that was quick, all things considered.)
>>
>> [1] http://www.samsung.com/global/business/hdd/faqView.do?b2b_bbs_msg_id=386
>
> Thanks for pointing that out. Yesterday I heard that the fix would not
> happen for a few weeks now we have a fix..
>

I applied the fix on 1 drive using the grub boot disk method from the
following site:

http://idolinux.blogspot.com/2009/10/create-dos-boot-disk-for-cd-or-grub.html

Since http://www.fdos.org does not have the files mentioned in the
blog I had to find it here:
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/micro/pc-stuff/freedos/files/distributions/1.0/

After that I rebooted into free dos. I selected something like highmem
only in freedos and then ran the samsung executable 181550HD204UI.EXE.

It found my 1 samsung F4 attached to the current machine (I have 2
others on a different box) and patched it. The firmware revision # did
not change however. That will be annoying as users can't tell they
have the bad firmware from the good..

I then ran the "How to reproduce" 3 times from the smartctl website
and I was not able to trigger this bug with the new firmware.

John