Mike Cloaked on Wed, 2013/01/16 10:18:

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On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Christian Hesse wrote:

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[...] If anyone can help advise on how to make a bootable usbkey to execute

Mike Cloaked on Tue, 2013/01/15 21:57: this,

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I would really appreciate it.

I do have the same drive and I updated the firmware booting the image off grub. All just need is a working grub (2.0 here) installation and syslinux (for memdisk). (Though doing it with syslinux should work as well.)

The grub.cfg should have a config section that looks like this:

menuentry "Update Crucial M4" { set root='(hd0,1)' linux16 /memdisk floppy initrd16 /boot2880.img }

If the files are in place (probably in /boot/) the image should boot and you can successfully update the drives firmware.

Mounting the boot image, modifying it or installing freedos is not necessary.

Thanks Christian - it sounds like you are running grub off the system already installed to the internal drive? If that is the case then maybe I will have to install arch to the internal drive first and then add in the grub entries to execute the firmware update and boot to them?

However it would be nice to be able to run grub (2) off a usbkey and execute the firmware update before installing arch to the internal drives which then already have the updated ssd firmware.

Does not matter where grub is installed to. It just has to find and boot the files.

I went through the grub2 docs - and at https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html found what I think is

On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Christian Hesse wrote: the most relevant fact which is biting me: In section 3.1 "Some BIOSes have a bug of exposing the first partition of a USB drive as a floppy instead of exposing the USB drive as a hard disk (they call it “USB-FDD” boot). In such cases, you need to install like this: # losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sdb1 # mount /dev/loop0 /mnt/usb # grub-install --boot-directory=/mnt/usb/bugbios --force --allow-floppy /dev/loop0 This install doesn't conflict with standard install as long as they are in separate directories." So I think all of the problems that I have had booting a usbkey off my new machine are likely to be due to the bios not properly recognising the usbkey as usb-hdd but as usb-fdd or possibly usb-zip which I seem to remember reading about a few years ago. At the end of a tiring evening last night I tried from my arch laptop to plug in the usb key and do the first of the above commands "losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sdb1" but that failed so I need to look up how to loop mount the device under arch. (Yes the key is device /dev/sdb in case you wanted me to check) Anyway I guess that those usbkeys that do boot must have been written to work around the issue of bioses that won't recognise usbkeys in the correct disk mode - and this is a new area for me to explore and try to understand and find a workable solution for. So it seems that the key prepared using any of the standard methods with grub2 or syslinux may only boot on a subset of machines - and that there are a number of machines which simply won't behave - yet the same key will boot on other computers that fails to boot on my machine! Frustrating in the extreme! -- mike c