I'm attempting to update my hard drive - the clicking noise fix (which i do suffer from) here is the info: i have a dell studio 1745. Windows 7 64 bit - 500gb seagate ST9500420AS hard drive on my service tags update page it gives me the firmware update to download (yes i pick the right one from the list there) - i follow the install instructions - copy the files to my usb drive and attempt the flash.bat update. The problem is: i get these messages in a box that pops up: unsupported 16 bit application backgrnd.com cannot start or run due to incopatbility with 64-bit versions of windows FDLH.exe cannot start or run due to incopatbility with 64-bit versions of windows but the download says its compatibility is for windows 7 32 and 64 bit? How can i do this update? I contacted customer support before coming to the forums - they sent me a message basically saying they cant help, they only supply the update.

So after battling with this for hours, I want to preserve what I learned for the benefit of others. Seagate harddisk firmware updates come in 2 flavours: Windows based and CDR images. Don't use the Windows ones. They mess with the MBR so they can wreck you're OS install if something goes wrong. Or in my case it just gives a useless error message. So CDR version it is. Use at own risk - This is not the official method.

Data on the disk should remain intact, but make backups just in case. 1) Download the CDR ISO image for your firmware update. Links to find the right one: ( ) ( ) The 2nd page listed above is a bit fussy about capital letters in the serial numbers etc, so it might require a few tries (You get a message in red if it fails). The tool linked to on the first page can theoretically take you to the correct download page too, but that didn't work for me so I typed in the codes manually on the 2nd page.

2) Use Winrar to extract the contents of the ISO file (7zip should also work). You're looking for a.ima file inside the ISO - there should only be one of them. Download game winning eleven 9 for pc full version. 3) Rename the.ima to.img 4) Download this tool to write the.img to a USB flash disk.

The firmware update utility loads the new firmware on your Seagate disk drive. This process can take a few minutes. Once the firmware update is complete, the utility will exit and reboot your system. If the utility cannot automatically reboot your system, you must reboot the system yourself.

This will overwrite anything on the flash. Take care to overwrite the correct drive letter. 5) Reboot & go to your BIOS. Change AHCI to IDE 6) Boot off the flash & run the firmware update.

Follow instructions in the update. 7) Set BIOS back to AHCI 8) Boot back into windows & use the tool from the 1st Seagate link (Step 1) to confirm that the firmware version is updated 9) Victory dance.Exact same procedure for SeaTools, except you start with a different ISO and skip step 8. Tried various other tricks like diskpart, unetbootin & batch file hacks - no joy.