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Comment by A_COMPUTER | Hacker News Reader

It's sort of funny that the NSA can remotely flash a running system's hard drive firmware, but Seagate makes me make a DOS bootdisk to do it. they really do have tech that the rest of us can't conceive of.

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It's fairly likely that the hard drive can be flashed from within the OS without any problems. The most likely reason for Seagate's actions is a good, old fashioned, case of CYA. By making you use a boot disk, you're getting rid of a lot of other factors, like buggy drivers for other components, etc, that could cause a system to hang mid-flash and brick the hard drive.

Also probably they don't see enough demand for people being able to effortlessly reflash/reprogram their harddisks to invest the necessary R&D to make it work seamlessly. There are hundreds of tricks to make flashing more reliable and unsusceptible to data corruption, but it's cheaper to just use a DOS tool and write "DO NOT TURN OFF OR RESET YOUR COMPUTER!" on the screen.

And not to forget that you get rid of all the folks who don't know what they do. No support calls. No complains.

Nah, they just don't have customers. If Seagate's flasher breaks your entire RAID array, you call Seagate support. If the NSA's flasher does, you don't call the NSA.

I'm sure they have backup copies of your data.

>but Seagate makes me make a DOS bootdisk to do it.

They don't want to worry about your "reg cleaner" and ask.com toolbar suddenly taking 100% of the CPU and screwing up the firmware write.

Heck, BIOS updates are done the same way, pretty much. The Windows installer shoves the new firmware binary into a space the BIOS can access, reboots the computer, updates during POST/BIOS, and then only when its successful, reboots again into Windows. Its not run when Windows is running. You'd have to be a little crazy to do that.

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