Updating firmware on a Crucial M4 drive, with Linux, no luck

When you think of SSD manufacturers, it might be obvious to think of them as Linux friendly, given they target power users, and Linux users are for the most part are power users. Seems like this is not that true for Crucial. My main personal laptop has, since last year, a 64GB Crucial M4 SSD – given I’ve not been using a desktop computer for a while it does start to feel small, but that’s a different point – which underwent a couple of firmware update since then. In particular, there is a new release 070H that is supposed to fix some nasty power saving issues.

Crucial only provide firmware update utilities for Windows 7 and 8 (two different versions of them), and then they have an utility for “Windows and Mac” — the latter is actually a ZIP file that contains an ISO file… well, I don’t have a CD to burn with me, so my first option was to run the Windows 7 file from my Windows 7 install, which resides on the external SATA harddrive. No luck with that, from what I read on the forums what the upgrader does is simply setting up an EFI application to boot, and then reboot. Unfortunately in my case there are two EFI partitions, because of the two bootable drives, and that most likely messes up with the upgrader.

Okay strike one, let’s look at the ISO file. The ISO is very simple and very small.. it basically is just an ISOLINUX tree that uses memdisk to launch a 2.88MB image file (2.88MB is a semi-standard floppy disk size, which never really went popular for real disks, but has been leveraged by most virtual floppy disk images in bootable CD-Roms for the expanded size). Okay what’s in the image file then? Nothing surprising, it’s a FreeDOS image, with Crucial’s own utility and the firmware.

So if you remember, I had some experience with trying to update BIOS through FreeDOS images, and I have my trusty USB stick with FreeDOS arriving on Tuesday with most of my personal effects that were in Italy waiting for me to find a final place to move my stuff on. But I wanted to see if I could try to boot the image file without needing the FreeDOS stick, so I checked. Grub2 does not include a direct way to load image — the reference to memdisk in their manual refers to the situation where you’re loading a standalone or rescue Grub image, nothing to do with what we care about.

The most obvious way to run the image is through SYSLINUX’s memdisk loader. Debian even has a package that allows you to just drop the images in /boot/images and adds them to the grub menu. Quick and easy, no? Well, no. The problem is that memdisk needs to be loaded with linux16 — and, well, Grub 2 does not support it if you’re booting via EFI, like I am.

I guess I’ll wait until Tuesday night, when my BIOS disk will be here, and I’ll just use it to update the SSD. It should solve the issue once and for all.