Tuesday, September 24, 2024

how to boot a Crucial firmware ISO image from a USB stick

Crucial sells NVMe SSD cards, such as the T500 series, for which they provide firmware updates. The latest firmware update (version P8CR004), however, is provided as an ISO image that may be bootable when copied to a CD, but not when copied to a USB stick using something straightforward like:

dd if=T500_P8CR004.iso of=/dev/sd_ bs=4M status=progress oflag=sync

where /dev/sd_ is the USB stick. The USB stick will boot, but only to a GRUB prompt. (It will even boot on a UEFI-only system, despite the Crucial instructions saying that "legacy" or "compatibility" mode is required.) It seems that a GRUB configuration file is missing.

Many sources, including Crucial's own instructions, will tell you to try various installer utilities (Etcher, Universal USB Installer, Rufus, usb-creator, et al.), but none of them performs the job any better than dd. The trick to booting the image is to run the following commands at the GRUB prompt:

set root=(cd0)
linux /boot/vmlinuz64 libata.allow_tpm=1 quiet base loglevel=3 waitusb=10 superuser mse-iso rssd-fw-update rssd-fwdir=/opt/firmware
initrd /boot/corepure64.gz
boot

These arguments come from the isolinux.cfg file, so check there for the exact values. The Micron Storage Executive should run automatically, printing something like:

Setting up Micron Storage Executive... DONE.

Upgrading drive /dev/nvme0 [Serial No. 2222222AAAA2] to P8CR004
..
Device Name  : /dev/nvme0
Firmware Update on /dev/nvme0 Succeeded!
CMD_STATUS   : Success
STATUS_CODE  : 0
TIME_STAMP   : Sun Sep 22 03:42:45 2024
Please remove bootable media. Press any key to continue...

No comments:

Post a Comment