Toshiba Hard Drive Firmware Upgrade Utility

[Adah Orhenkowski]

Isit possible to use non-certified hard drives in a Dell MD3220 storage array? I ended up getting 3 new drives that were the EXACT same model number as the existing ones. Then I bought the drive caddies to go with them.

Once the new drives arrived I mounted them on the caddies and inserted them into my storage array to see an Incompatible status. They have all the same specs. The only difference is the firmware. Still oblivious as to what was going on I started the standard process of upgrading the firmware. The firmware on the drives I received was 1701 and all my other existing drives were DE09.

After looking into it on the web it seems that it's a common practice for vendors like Dell to lock down their software to only support DELL BRANDED hardware! Even though the drives are the exact same drive (same model and everything both made by Toshiba).

Now I'm stuck with these three drives that I only bought because Dell wouldn't sell them to me (I guess they no longer make them). Not to mention the caddies I bought elsewhere. My question is, is it possible to somehow flash the firmware on these drives so that Dell's software/hardware will accept them?

Just to add if it helps others, I wanted to post where I was able to find the firmware for my drives. Dell does not make it easy to get to. I had to check each version release of the firmware packs to find the firmware I needed for my drive. Suggestion, don't download each one, use the README (they include for each firmware pack) to search for the firmware you are looking for then download the large pack of firmware. Mine happen to be A19 that contained the DE09 firmware I was looking for.

This is the normal way that Dell wants you to update the firmware. It takes firmware packages (*.df) such as Toshiba_AL13SEB600_DE09.df. I thought that I could try to just hack the firmware and use this tool to update the drives. But with this tool it first reads the drives and determines that are in Bypassed or Offline status and make the drives inaccessible. This happens before you can even get to the Download Physical Disk Firmware window. So unfortunately this was a bust.

This is a tool that can be downloaded from here. It allows you to create a bootable CD or USB thumb drive. You can then boot the CD/USB up to upgrade the drives in a non windows environment. Unfortunately this would not work for me either. When I booted up my R630 Dell server which has a boot drive that's mirrored (2 x 600GB drives), and a data drive (not currently used) that is running a raid 5 array from 4 drives, and has connections to my MD3220 storage unit of course. That makes a total of 6 drives mounted into the R630 server and then I have one I inserted (then set as a NON-RAID drive) to flash the firmware on. When booting up this utility it seems to only show me 4 drives, and two of those drives are the same drives just from different controllers. I have no clue why it's not showing me all the drives. But this does not seem to be working for me at all.

The day prior to the upgrade from Mountain Lion to El Capitan, my Toshiba hardrive was recognized by my Macbook and I was able to write information to the drive and had full access to it. After the upgrade and the installation, my Macbook prompts me with the "The Disk you inserted is not readable by this computer" with the three button selections of "initialize, ignore, eject". I tried the "initialize" button which brings up the disk utility and then I proceeded to try the "first aid" which doesn't do anything.

As you can imagine there is plenty of things on this drive that I would like access to. This drive is only used for my Macbook and if I remember correctly is formatted as a FAT 32, but I am not 100% sure. All I know is it worked perfect with Mountain Lion OS and now after the OS X El Capitan update it can no longer be recognized by the computer.

Similarly to garabe87, I have just come here to say thank you. Having spent 3 or 4 hours searching around trying to find a way to recover my hard drive (with pretty much all of my life on it), it was simply the issue of not recognising the password tool. Toshiba should definitely be making this easier to find. What a relief! Thanks again.

Thank you - now I have downloaded the software what do I do? I am still unable to write to my external Toshiba hard disk - I have always been able to read it and copy documents from my external had drive to my main processor but I still cannot write to the disk. I have no idea what my password is and I'm afraid I don't know what to do with the software now that I have installed it? Any suggestions? Thanks.

I literally just registered an account on here just to thank you for this. I couldn't find anything searching for an hour. Installed this, restarted and this new drive now shows up on my Mac. Wasn't even getting anywhere trying to get the installer off my old Dell laptop and transferring across manually. Literally as soon as my mac restarted following the install at that link the Toshiba HDD now recognised by my mac.

I'm having a little issue with mounting my external hard drive lately. I've tried quite a few methods in hope of getting it to work again, but so far, no luck. I hope someone can help me solve this issue, or those who have the same problem may also share your insights.

My external hard drive was working fine about a week ago. But one day, I ejected the hard drive and the icon disappeared, so I thought it was safe to unplug it. When I did, it said the hard drive was not properly removed. It still works fine when I use it the next day, but the same thing happened. It said the drive was not properly removed after I ejected the drive, waited for the icon to disappear, and then unplugged the drive. After that, it never works again, and the attached images are the info I got when I tried to mount or run first aid on this drive.

I had this happen 4 TB WD My Passport on Big Sur 11.6.2, the 1 TB partition for my Time Machine didn't come up and mounting gave the "disenter error 49218". Here's what worked for me (at least for now):

I opened Disk Utility and run first aid on it and got an error (com.apple.DiskManagement.disenter error -119930878.) but after I closed it, it continued running and some minutes later, the drive was fixed and I was able to see it in Finder and use it again.

I unplugged an external HDD without ejecting it first, then had error 49218 when trying to mount it. Surprisingly First Aid didn't show any errors, but still I couldn't mount it. Restarting the MacBook helped, it just automounted. I'm on Big Sur.

Ok, I had this same issue and found a fix. However, it's ONLY a fix if you do not care about what is on the external HDD. Open Disk Utility and hit Partition. Change it to APFS (Encrypted). I hit "Apply" and it warned me that all data would be deleted. I said ok. It wiped it and then it automatically mounted and all is well now.

FIXED!I've had trouble accessing my external LaCie time machine drive for a while now and nothing I had found online has helped. Couldn't mount it, erase it or use first aid on it. Would get failed messages non stop.The only solution that has helped I have, fortunately, found was by this guy on youtube, =Z9y1oRYlmh0. Formatting the container within the disk utility to a MAC OS Journaled had worked and I was able to access the partition anew and then restart the time machine.

I'm having the same problem with my MacBook Pro M1 max. I have a 2TB external drive I was using with Time machine backups that I can No longer mount. Even disk utility won't allow the disk to be erased and reformatted. I would have thought that apple would have the solution by now seeing how so many have encountered this problem. can someone please help????

I had the same issue - I plugged in the USB drive and one volume of three on the physical drive wouldn't mount, giving error 49218. MBP mid-2014 with Big Sur 11.6.8. Like some others, restarting my Mac (with the drive still attached - not sure this is relevant) brought them all back.

i went to the url, its only got windows and mac files, im guessing i need to boot via usb flash, since my main problem here is i actually dont want to burn a cd with the iso, and i dont have a floppy. i do have a 256mb usb stick already formatted as fat16. I copied the .isos file contents directly onto the usb stick, but i cant seem to get that to boot. Should it be usb-fdd, usb-hdd, or usb-cdrom, or usb-zip in bios? maybe its not flagged as boot?

Why not? This is what you need to do. The firmware update is available as a bootable iso - you are in luck! That is, it is not just a Windows executable which would force you to either install Windows or use an unsupported method. No, you have a bootable iso. All you need to do is burn it to a CD, boot it and proceed.

EDIT: Ideally, I would burn the iso following their instructions i.e. either in Windows or Mac OS X. However, if you burn the iso in Linux and it boots, I would guess that you are probably fairly safe.

I have found pre-made FreeDOS images in the past, and used it to update the firmware of my Samsung 830 SSD before I found out that there are hidden bootable ISO's. All you need to do is make a bootable USB with it, then either make a small partition to stick the exe (and firmware), or stick it in the image itself. Then run said exe from the command line.

does this mean i have to flag it bootable with a partition editor? i already have the usb with the iso from the download source, which is bootable i believe, i just didnt flag the drive as bootable.

and to boot this, what setting am i looking for in my bios(usb-hdd, hsb-floppy or usb-hdd, or which one specifically? those are the usb choices), because what i thought i knew, didnt work, unless its because i didnt flag the drive as bootable in a partition program.

I didn't say anything about hirens, and have never actually used hirens boot cd. I was able to find premade FreeDOS bootable USB images that I could then just dd to a usb stick. This should use very little of a decent size USB, so the rest can be used to store the file in question. You might be able to mount the then written image and write it to that partition as well, though I didn't try this.

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