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As I mentioned earlier, I have installed ubuntu on X25M 80 GB SSD and ubuntu is the only OS on my laptop. How do i check and update the SSD firmware? on intel's site, everything is for windows :( Anyone having experience doing this?

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Intel provides the download in an ISO format.

Intel® SATA SSD Firmware Update Tool [ 011102M388208850.ISO ] - Bootable ISO image Intel® SATA SSD Firmware Update Tool; this is the recommended method to update the firmware on systems running Windows*, Linux* and Mac* operating systems. It requires a blank CD, CD burning software, and a read/writeable CD-ROM drive.

Their instructions and the website only mention Windows and OSX, on the front page but it works in Ubuntu. Just download the ISO, right click on it, and select "Burn to disc", and then boot off the CD.

I updated my 40GB X25-M this way.

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I did not want to waste a full CD (or even a CD-RW) on just one firmware update, so I looked for an alternative way using a USB flash drive.

I came across this excellent Gentoo article which showed me the key points to get such a setup working.

Requirements:

  • an Intel SSD (or any other device that needs to be flashed and which uses FreeDOS)
  • a USB drive with a FAT16 partition having at least 5 MiB of free space (28KiB for the kernel, 4.8MiB for the Intel updater). I'll refer to this mounted partition with /media/USBDRIVE hereafter. (other partition types should work too, please confirm this)
  • The GRUB2 bootloader on your machine (actually, it may work for other setups too, but I've only tested this one)
  • The .iso file from http://downloadcenter.intel.com
  • The package genisoimage for the geteltorito program
  • The package syslinux for a kernel image

Although I've never had an issue with any firmware update, making a backup is recommended as well.

The latest driver version at the moment is 1.92. The download is named 0911036202M388208850.iso. If there appears to be a newer version, adjust the file names below accordingly.

  1. Extract the boot image from the iso file (the target filename was randomly chosen):

    geteltorito 0911036202M388208850.iso > /media/USBDRIVE/intel.img
    
  2. Copy a kernel to it:

    cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /media/USBDRIVE/
    
  3. You're now done with preparing the USB flash drive, continue with the instructions for booting from the flash drive:

    1. Boot from your disk containing the GRUB2 bootloader (usually the SSD in your machine) but, hold Shift to get the GRUB2 boot menu
    2. When the menu appears, press C for a GRUB shell
    3. Issue the ls command to find your USB partition. The output will look like:

      (hd0) (hd0,msdos1) (hd0,msdos2) (hd1) (hd1,msdos1)
      

      Here, (hd1,msdos2) is likely your USB flash drive (disk 2, partition 1). Confirm it with the below command, it should show at least the memdisk and intel.img files:

      ls (hd1,msdos1)/
      

      If the files were not found, try other partitions, e.g. ls (hd0,msdos1). In the following steps, I'll refer to (hd1,msdos1), adjust if necessary.

    4. Now that you know the partition, run the next commands:

      set root=(hd1,msdos1)
      linux16 /memdisk
      initrd16 /intel.img
      boot
      
    5. You should now get a lot of command output from the bootloader, after that FreeDOS loads and the Intel firmware updater shows up.
    6. When done, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot, you can then remove the USB flash drive.

These guide was designed for minimal hacking with the bootloader and hardware (USB flash drive). Of course you can install the GRUB2 bootloader to your USB drive, but I consider that overkill for just one update.

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