I recently discovered that two of the hard drives in my server had a firmware bug that could leave to silent dataloss when used with smartd (and other programs). Fortunately, there is a firmware update. Unfortunately, it doesn’t change the drive’s reported firmware revision so you can’t tell if the update has been applied already…

To run the update, it says “Save the .exe files to a bootable media”. It doesn’t provide any more details than that, but apparently it needs to be a DOS boot disk/usb drive. This link provides an easy way to take a pre-generated FreeDos image and DD it to a USB drive. Once you do that, you can mount it and copy the files to run to the FAT partition.

FreeDOS prebuilt bootable USB flash drive image – http://chtaube.eu/computers/freedos/bootable-usb/