Updating Crucial MX100 Firmware with Ubuntu

There has been a Firmware update for the Crucial MX100 to MU02. In case you are running Ubuntu there is an easy way to perform the update without using a CD or USB Stick.

As the firmware comes in form of an iso image containing Tiny Core Linux, we can instruct grub2 to directly boot from it. Here is how:

  1. append the following to /etc/grub.d/40_custom:
    menuentry "MX100 FW Update" {
     set isofile="/home/<USERNAME>/Downloads/MX100_MU02_BOOTABLE_ALL_CAP.iso"
     # assuming your home is on /dev/sda3 ATTENTION: change this so it matches your setup
     loopback loop (hd0,msdos3)$isofile
     linux (loop)/boot/vmlinuz libata.allow_tpm=1 quiet base loglevel=3 waitusb=10 superuser rssd-fw-update rssd-fwdir=/opt/firmware rssd-model=MX100
     initrd (loop)/boot/core.gz
    }

    read this for details of the file format.

  2. run sudo update-grub
  3. reboot and select “MX100 FW Update”
  4. Now you can delete the menuentry created in step1

Note that this actually much “cleaner” than using windows where you have to download 150MB of the Crucial Store Executive Software which actually is a local webserver written in Java (urgh!). But all it can do is display some SMART monitoring information and automatically perform the above steps on windows.

Header Image CC-by MiNe