Flash HGST HUS724040ALS640 with A280

[laurentiuB]

Hello, I have 2 HGST HUS724040ALS640 drives and I want to flash them with the A280 firmware. I bought them from an online seller and I don't know where they came from. Currently both of them are reporting to be Hitachi DKW2E-H4R0SS.
I'm a noob in hdd firmware flashing, never did it before, so I did some research on the internet and after a few days I think I found two solutions. First is with Hugo and the second is with Niagara. I tried them both, with the correct firmware file I think (MPGNA280.bin), but both methods fail with errors.

As I said I'm a noob, I just want to use this two drives on a home lab server. Is there something I'm missing, has anyone managed to flash this drives?
I'm using Windows 7 x64 on a Dell R420 with a H310 mini controller.
I have attached a picture with one of the drive and some print screens from Hugo and Niagara.

Can anyone guide me or point me to a documentation somewhere?
Thank you!

 

[Whaaat]

You are trying to update the drive with an older firmware than it already has

 

[laurentiuB]

I didn't knew that.
Actually my problem is that I can't use this drives on my R420. I thought that if I can flash them with the A280 they will work like the two others HUS724020ALS640 are.

 

[Whaaat]

oops, it seems that this version of firmware is a proprietary HPE edition and you have very low probability to cross-flash it to oem hgst. Sorry, don't know how to help you any further. At least you can update firmware from A280 to A320 on two other drives to see how update works when it works.

 

[laurentiuB]

I was afraid of that. The seller told me that I can only use them in HP workstations.

 

[Whaaat]

just curious how exactly drives are unusable with the current firmware? They are 512 bps - should be no format issues under windows

 

[laurentiuB]

Thank you for your time!
I can't even write the partition table on them. Any try to partition them throws a bunch of I/o error.
The picture below is when I had Proxmod installed and I was trying to create the GPT. Sorry for the poor quality.

 

[Whaaat]

hmm.. as long as you have ordinary version at hand, try to compare the output of sdparm from both a280 and abab drives.

 

[laurentiuB]

I never used sdparm before, I see it has a lot of commands I don't understand. Can you be more specific on what should I scan?

 

[Whaaat]

Look for the differences between drives, in HP version something related to media can be set to non-default value preventing it from normal operation. 'Software write protect' or 'Reject write without protection' for example

 

[laurentiuB]

I did a search for "protect" and both firmware have the same values.
Left colon is A280 firmware.