On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Christian Hesse <list@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked@xxxxxxxxx> on Wed, 2013/01/16 10:18: > > On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 6:56 AM, Christian Hesse <list@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > > > Mike Cloaked <mike.cloaked@xxxxxxxxx> on Tue, 2013/01/15 21:57: > > > > [...] > > > > If anyone can help advise on how to make a bootable usbkey to execute > > > this, > > > > 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 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