On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 9:57 PM, Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked@gmail.com>wrote:

If anyone can help or suggest links to solve the following problem I would appreciate it.

I have a new system built with an Intel DQ77KB motherboard with a Crucial mSATA M4 SSD, and a Crucial SATA M4 SSD drive. I want to install arch on this system and indeed preparing a usbkey with the archiso install media using dd to write the usbkey boots just fine.

Also the latest PartedMagic iso written to a usbkey also boots fine so that I can format the SSD drives (both of them). Looking at the system profile I can see all the peripherals, including all the RAM and both SSD drives.

However before starting the arch install I want to update the firmware on the SSD drives. This is available from the Crucial website either as a Windows 7/8 .exe (which I can't use) or a "manual" firmware update file which is an iso (containing memdisk from syslinux, and a floppy image file boot2880.img)

Running the "file" command on the boot2880.img file after loop mounting it gives:

# file /mnt/iso/boot/isolinux/boot2880.img /mnt/iso/boot/isolinux/boot2880.img: x86 boot sector, FREE-DOS Beta 0.9 Bootloader KERNEL.SYS, code offset 0x3c, OEM-ID "FreeDOS ", sectors/cluster 2, root entries 240, sectors 5760 (volumes <=32 MB) , sectors/FAT 9, serial number 0x2b6112fe, label: "BOOTABLE ", FAT (12 bit)

Writing the iso to a usbkey won't boot - the screen goes blank and nothing happens when I write the iso to a usbkey with a FAT32 key with the boot flag. I have tried isolinux and that does not seem to work. I have tried a bootable grub2 usbkey and that does not work - all are prepared from a working arch linux laptop.

I have following numerous "recipes" for making the usbkey from various sources on the web and none seem to work at all!

The odd thing is that for syslinux I can't even get a menu item on the screen when booting the key - nor for grub 2.

I have used two different makes of usbkey - both 4GB....same result - and both keys will boot fine with the archiso or PartedMagic.

I don't know if I am doing something fundamentally stupid but this is driving me nuts! I have used gparted, as well as fdisk, as well as trying parted to reformat the usbkeys. Nothing I do seems to work!

There must be a good step-by-step guide somewhere on how to get a usbkey with sysylinux to boot the firmware updater - which seems to have a floppy image file (boot2880.img) and uses memdisk to boot it - though the version on the iso file is about two year old whereas arch current memdisk in syslinux is up to date.

If anyone can help advise on how to make a bootable usbkey to execute this, I would really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

I raised this issue above about two weeks ago - and finally tonight resolved the problem. I checked on the Intel site for BIOS updates for my motherboard (DQ77KB) - and it turned out that Intel has in the interim released a new BIOS version 048 which has a bunch of fixes including " Updated VBIOS to fix issue where there is no display in DOS." After installing the new BIOS I was able to update the SSD drive firmware without any problem at all - so it seems that whatever method I tried to boot the firmware update which is DOS based would have failed until the BIOS was updated! So I am a happy bunny again with current Crucial SSD drive firmware! -- mike c