[Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Troubles]

I just read in a german forum that HDDs with P/Ns ending in -303 do not work with this iso, only endings of -300

No luck for me as well, I have ST3500320AS, Firmware: SD15, online check says my drive is affected, but the booting from the update cd ends with "FreeDOS" on the screen with a blinking cursor.

This happened to me when I had my ICH9R controller set to RAID mode. If you have that controller, change it to IDE or AHCI in the BIOS and it should work. Of course, the actual patch probably won't.

[Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 Troubles]

Excellent guys, just tried the recovery commands, rebooted, bam! OS straight up, no problems so, ones you've got the RS232 connection sorted, it's about 10mins to fix the disc.

Again MASSIVE thanks to fatlip for the RS232 setup, pichi for the BSY resetting and Gradius2 for digging up the LBA0 fix \o/

Thanks for this feedback! And of course many thanks to fatlip, pichi and the others involved. My 500GB 7200.11 (ST3500320AS, SD15, 5QM2****) has not yet died and according to Seagates serial number check is should not be affected. But I don't have any confidence...

I have the same drive and the serial checker gives me the same result. The problem is the original KB article stated explicitly that model WAS affected and models built THROUGH Dec. 08 were needing an update. Now they changed the models affected in the KB article update and say it was only models made IN December. It's confusing the hell of out people and they haven't said why they changed it or if those of us with models not listed in the update need to worry. I can't even seem to e-mail them through the Seagate website for some reason. I get some weird login error even though I'm already logged in via their forums.

[vlc doesnt work..]

If you're running the latest - 0.8.6a - try using OpenGL mode. There should be a quick switch link in the start menu entry. Works fine for me in that mode.

[Internet Connection Problems (Weird)]

Are you using the driver package provided from Intel's website? Because I have the same adapter and had much trouble after using the new Intel software. I was getting 30-40% CPU usage just from network transfers, causing my entire system to run more sluggish. After reinstalling Vista recently, I stuck with the default drivers that come with the OS, and that problem has not occured. I think the newer Intel drivers use a different form of task offloading that does not play well with Vista (even though they say they are compatible.)

Try uninstalling the Intel adapter driver package (if you are using that) and go back to the stock drivers that came with Vista. That solved my troubles.