How to Update Multiburner without a Floppy Drive?

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dmcgibbo · #1 Post by **dmcgibbo** » Sun Sep 26, 2004 8:31 pm

There is a Multidrive Firmware Update but it's a diskette update and I don't have a floppy drive. How can I download this and update the firmware if I need it without a FDD?

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-57083

darkhelmet03 · #2 Post by **darkhelmet03** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 11:24 am

I did the same with a diskette and my HDD's firmware some time ago on my T41.

Use NERO Burning ROM or something similar. You can create a bootable cd from a bootable diskette with all the diskette's files. This way I was able to update the firmware on my hard drive. The CD booted fine.

dmcgibbo · #3 Post by **dmcgibbo** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 2:11 pm

darkhelmet03 wrote:I did the same with a diskette and my HDD's firmware some time ago on my T41.

Use NERO Burning ROM or something similar. You can create a bootable cd from a bootable diskette with all the diskette's files. This way I was able to update the firmware on my hard drive. The CD booted fine.

I don't understand how to do this - I need to do the Multi-Recorder firmware update AND the HDD Hard drive update (this one has like 10 .exe files for 10 different floppies) Do I need to make a disk for each one? Also, when I double click on the .exe and it tries to extract it to a disk, it will only allow it to extract to a floppy disk so I don't know what to do here...

Conmee · #4 Post by **Conmee** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:13 pm

The problem is that you still need a floppy to extract the firmware upgrade. I downloaded and installed the upgrade. When I ran it, it asked me to put a blank floppy into the drive a: or I could select another floppy. External USB floppy is the way to go... DOS and floppies will probably continue their slow deaths for another 5-10 years...

If you can somehow get your hands on the files themselves (heck, I'll even send you the files zipped from the floppy I made if you message me and send me your email address), just put them on a bootable USB Memory key and you're all set. In order to make a bootable CD, you still need either a floppy or the floppy bootable image. Since you don't have a floppy, I can use Roxio to create the bootable disk image of the firmware floppy, and send that to you also. But you'll need Roxio (Nero might even be able to use the Roxio bootdisk.img files too).

Daniel.

puco · #5 Post by **puco** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 4:16 pm

I heard about a software (I believed it's called WinImage or something like that) which can extract those SFX floppy images to an image that can be burned with Nero or anything else

awolfe63 · #6 Post by **awolfe63** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 7:17 pm

Conmee wrote:The problem is that you still need a floppy to extract the firmware upgrade. I downloaded and installed the upgrade. When I ran it, it asked me to put a blank floppy into the drive a: or I could select another floppy. External USB floppy is the way to go... DOS and floppies will probably continue their slow deaths for another 5-10 years...

Daniel.

Ditto. I bought a USB floppy for $15. Comes out twice a year for problems like this.

darkhelmet03 · #7 Post by **darkhelmet03** » Mon Sep 27, 2004 10:53 pm

Forgot to mention that I created the diskette on my desktop and then used Nero to clone it to a bootable CD, which was finally used in my T41.

I also have to get a USB floppy one day....

or|on · #8 Post by **or|on** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 5:08 am

Sitting here with some TDK DVD-RWs which the recorder doesn’t seem to recognize/support.

Downloaded the new firmware from IBM hoping it will solve the issue.

But no floppy.

My question is can I make the floppy on another computer and then make an image of the floppy and burn that on a cd..
Is there possible to upgrade firmware in the DVD drive when using it to boot from? Does the flasher program get cached to memory?

Or is USB stick the way to go.
I have a stick but have no idea how to put the files on it and make it bootable, and can every stick be booted from?

darkhelmet03 · #9 Post by **darkhelmet03** » Fri Oct 01, 2004 4:11 pm

I did that using NERO on a desktop machine and then used the cloned CD on my thinkpad.

a) use the IBM program to create the bootable diskette in some machine (e.g. desktop) with a floppy drive

b) use NERO (the easiest way) to make a bootable CD out of the bootable floppy you just created (assuming the previous machine has a CDRW)

c) simply boot your ThinkPad with this new CD and update the firmware

worked for me...

csarrasin · #10 Post by **csarrasin** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 8:09 am

BIG DISCLAIMER: the hack I am about to describe below is a bit on the dangerous side. Only follow these instructions if you understand what's going on and you feel confortable with thesem. IBM say explicitely in their README file that "Running these programs other than FW.EXE could ruin your DVD-RAM drive."

The only thing you will need in addition to the DVD-RAM firmware upgrade (as shown above) is a so-called "bootable" USB2.0 memory stick (sometimes called "memory key"), which is partitioned as a legacy 1.44MB floppy partition and the remainder as a larger so-called "USB-HDD" partition.

Background: I tried the approach described above, ie: "somehow extract the files to a floppy" and then burn a bootable CD-RW (I used IBM's own "Record Now" s/w) and then try and run the f/w upgrade from there.

Various people report success with this approach (see darkhelmet03's post above). It didn't work for me: although the CD booted fine and showed me the menu from the "FW" program with the notice that the firmware on my DVD-RAM drive was elligible for an upgrade form K103 to K104, when I would hit '2' to proceed with the upgrade, it would load the program and then display something along the lines of "Verifyng drive" and sit there forever (I waited about 15 minutes and then gave up).

I concluded that upgrading the drive with the upgrade media being in the same drive was probably not going to work (not sure why it works for some people).

In a nutshell, what I did was install the upgrade on a USB stick (USB-HDD), make that bootable and upgrade from there. This may sound easy, but it really isn't unless you know the right steps.

My USB Stick is an "Integral Memory 1GB USB2.0 Flash Drive". It comes partitioned in two: a 1.44MB "floppy emulation" partition (USD-FDD) which shows up as A: on my T42p and the balance of the capacity as a big USB-HDD partition (although I am no expert in USB sticks, this seems to be a common setup for them from what I read around the Web).

Attempting to get the USB stick to boot was a major pain in the ***. Although it says "bootable" on the packaging (which is why I bought this particular one), it took me a loooong time to figure out to even make it boot on my T42p.

I first thought: having a floppy emulation will make this extremely easy, just extract the firmware to the A: drive (worked like a charm) and then reboot, hit F12, chose USB-HDD and voila... Yeah, right, this was a few wasted hours ago. I later found out that apparently you can only boot from the HDD, not the "FDD" partition of a USB2.0 stick (maybe this is just a shortcoming of my particular brand - not sure).

Anyway, what I ended up doing was following some other useful advice from this forum (http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=2514) and download a nifty utility form HP (ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp2700 ... P27213.exe) to make the HDD part of the stick bootable. This was also quite hard (the problem being that the boot sector of IBM's FW upgrade diskette (which was on my pseudo A: drive) doesn't seem to be recognized by HP's utility as a valid DOS boot sector). I therefore did the following:

(note - A: is the USB stick's pseudo floppy drive):

1. Extract IBM's FW diskette onto A: (as already explained)

2. Copy all the files away from A: onto a temp area on C:

3. Reformat A: using XP's applet, telling it to make a bootable floppy

4. Use HP's utility to reformat the HDD partition of the stick, using the files from A: as the boot software

5. Verified that I could now boot from the USB-HDD - this was a major encouraging step

6. Went back to XP, copied everything from the temp area to the USB HDD. You have to leave out the COMMAND.COM from the FW distribution(compatibility problems) and in CONFIG.SYS, change shell=A:\COMMAND.COM /E:256 /P to shell=C:\COMMAND.COM... (the USB stick boots as C: which will cause further problems down the line).

7. Attempt to boot from USB-HDD worked fine and launched IBM's "FW.EXE" firmware upgrade utility as expected. However, when I pressed '2', it would insist to look for the actual firmware on A: I tried playing around with the parameters in FW.PRO to no avail. I was ready to give up, having wasted several valuable hours of my otherwise short week-end and was therefore in a really good mood

8. Trying the CD-RW approach again, I noticed that the next thing FW.EXE does - assuming it's happily running off something called A: - is run LDR_BZ01.EXE. Re-reading IBM's aforementioned warning from the README file, I took a deep breath and decided to run that program manually from the C: prompt on my USB-HDD stick (having exited the useless FW.EXE program) - IT ACTUALLY WORKED and upgraded my firmware without a hitch.

I can only say one thing, this procedure isn't for the faint at heart (and again, if you damage your hardware in any way during the process, it will be your own responsibility, not mine) and I can't believe that IBM is forcing us to do this or buy an otherwise useless USB floppy. That latter route, though, is probably a much easier one and I would certainly recommend it if you feel uncomfortable following my rambling above...

Good luck

Christian

MadeInJapan · #11 Post by **MadeInJapan** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 9:55 pm

csarrasin, Christian,
Thanks for your post on how to get USB drive to be bootable. Been at this for days and days and had never found a good solution until I read your post and downloaded the HP tool. It works great! I wasn't trying to update my firmware on a CD/DVD, but was trying to get Ghost on a USB so that I don't have to have my Floppy drive connected through my serial port. Now I can do that!

Leon · #12 Post by **Leon** » Sun Oct 03, 2004 10:22 pm

does anyone know of any software/method that will make your usb key appear to the system as an a: drive?

dmcgibbo · #13 Post by **dmcgibbo** » Thu Jan 20, 2005 11:34 pm

ok well to bring back an old topic, i now have a usb floppy drive and i did the hard disk drive upgrade just fine.

however, when i do the multi-recorder upgrade, although the floppy boot starts fine, when i go to upgrade it and it says "Loading..." it just hangs there instead of installing successfully.

anyone know what gives? could the stuff i downloaded/extracted from the IBM site for the multiburner firmware upgrade be corrupt? i downloaded it and extracted it a couple of times. the tech said it could be my drive but the exact same floppy and usb drive worked just fine for the hard drive diskette upgrade.

adam777 · #14 Post by **adam777** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 6:04 am

darkhelmet03 wrote:I did that using NERO on a desktop machine and then used the cloned CD on my thinkpad.

a) use the IBM program to create the bootable diskette in some machine (e.g. desktop) with a floppy drive

b) use NERO (the easiest way) to make a bootable CD out of the bootable floppy you just created (assuming the previous machine has a CDRW)

c) simply boot your ThinkPad with this new CD and update the firmware

worked for me...

OK, i realise i brought this thread back from the dead...

Anyway, i've tried the method mentioned above and everything went fine up to the point of the update itself.
I was able to boot from CD and the update program launched correctly.
However, at some point i'm asked to open the tray and remove any CD from the drive before updating - but i cannot do this because the update data is on a CD of course...

So, what do i do - i did not have the guts to try and update with the CD in the drive, i'm not even sure the update program will let me carry on while the CD is still loaded.
Anyone here knows the solution?
Thanks in advance

JHaislet · #15 Post by **JHaislet** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 6:18 am

Unrelated to Adam777's question, but my brand new T43 that was made on 6/29/05 still comes with firmware v1.03 for the multi-burner. Kinda interesting as it appears 1.04 was released quit some time ago.

EDIT: I just realized that update is for the 812 multiburner. Mine is a 822-S.

How to Update Multiburner without a Floppy Drive?

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