Niagara Quick-Start Guide

• To get Niagara, go to the Rochester Firmware Tools Team website:

http://w3.rochester.hgst.com/~hddtools/

Download the appropriate .exe file. For

the Customer edition, for example, go to
the Customer Page, choose Niagara, and
then choose the version that matches
what you want. The filename should be
something like
NiagaraSetup_Customer_1.2.8.exe.

• After saving the .exe file, double-click

on it to run the Niagara installer. We
recommend accepting all of the default
setup options, unless you have specific
needs that you know of.

• After Niagara is installed, you

can find its icon in your Start
Menu. To start, choose
‘Niagara (SPTI)’ or ‘Niagara
(ASPI)’. (See note at end of
document.*)

• The first time Niagara is executed, an initial

window will open with the purpose of locking
drives from all Niagara operations. It is a good
idea to block Niagara from performing operations
on your computer’s system drives--the drive(s) on
which you have the Operating System. Select the
drives in the left pane that you know that you
want to ‘lock’ out of Niagara, then click the right-
arrow button to move them into the ‘Locked’
pane. Click Close when you are finished locking
your system drives.

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 Niagara Quick-Start Guide

• When Niagara is finished initializing and opening, you should see three windows. The first window
(the Niagara Console Window) is essentially a status window that shows command results and error
information. Some Niagara operations have windows for any resulting data, while others put data in
this Console window.

The Niagara Command Window is your main GUI for performing operations. From here you can
select drives, open operation windows, or operate immediate commands. For example, to download
new firmware to a drive, click the ‘Download Code…’ quick button. Enter the proper firmware
binary filename that you want to put on the drive, and click the Execute button. You will see running
status and error messages of the firmware download in the Niagara Console Window.

Finally, the Abort Tcl window is a means by which to abort any running Niagara operations.

• More tools are available from the

Command Window’s Tools menu.
These are generally tools that you won’t
need to use very often.

• By default, Niagara operations are performed on the single drive that is currently selected/checked in
the Niagara Command Window. There might be times, however, when you want to perform Niagara
operations on several drives automatically. The trick for selecting multiple drives is to first uncheck
the ‘Synchronize Console/GUI’ option in the Command Window. With this option unchecked, you
can select/check multiple drives in the Command Window.

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 Niagara Quick-Start Guide

When multiple drives are selected, all

Niagara operations should operate on
each drive sequentially. For example,
to download the same firmware to
multiple drives, perform the
‘Download Code…’ operation having
selected multiple drives in the
Command Window. Niagara will
automatically cycle through all of the
drives that you selected, downloading
the new firmware to each one in turn
(with status in the Console Window).

This is an example of pressing the Inquiry button with

multiple drives.

• *NOTE: By default, Niagara is

installed with an option to run on
Adaptec’s Windows ASPI layer. In
order to use this feature of Niagara,
you need to first download the ASPI
layer from Adaptec’s website. (Go to
http://www.adaptec.com/, choose
Support, Downloads, SCSI Software,
Windows ASPI Package, and then
whatever version is the most recent
[v4.71.2 as of the writing of this
document].) As an alternative to
ASPI, you can use Niagara with the
SPTI option, which is an integral part
of all Windows 2000 and XP operating
systems.

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