hi there, first many many thx for your wonderful thread here !! i´ve just signed up only for this reason.. okay, hope u can help me a little bit , only one short question: got a ST31500341AS SD17, unusual "clack" at startup but was fully okay, saw it under computer-administration->everything wonderful but little "freezes" (it was on Vista btw..afterwards i´ve read that it could maybe a Vista-Problem..) Okay, lets do a short firmware upgrade to SD1A or SD1B (done the same a months ago with a 500GB Samsung because the SB950 has sometimes trouble with some special Samsungs with particular firmwares..that was a "thing" of 5 min and everything was wonderful) so long story, short sense, found the right firmware on .iso but my model has a -500 at the end and the update works only for -300 -303 etc..;drive was not recognized.. okay read an article about manually flashing with sf - ....*.lod etc... started it "...sending data..", waited 5 min and nothing happens...wait another 5 min, nothing happens..->shutdown.. restart and no wonder->was gone in the bios and it "clacks" 3 1/2 times and that was it... okay, we now a have a "corrupt" firmware...can i try to use these method (Seagate 7200.11 fix) here to re-flash/initialize the drive also with a corrupted firmware ? as far as i understand, because we have parts of the firmware on the PCB and parts on the platter, the PCB will completely write a new firmware-section on the platter or am i wrong ?(or did i destroy the firmware on the PCB ??) many thanx in advance and many greets from here !!