Re: cd burning with plextor drives.

[Rogier Wolff <R.E.Wolff@BitWizard.nl>]

On Sat, Jul 29, 2006 at 01:33:42PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> (Yeah, I realize that it's also possible that the firmware update
> could happen by the drive just reading a disk, since the controller
> will do various things on its own anyway. I don't actually know if
> that is ever the case, or possibly even the _common_ case, but my
> wild guess would be that it's a lot more common to have a firmware
> update SCSI command than to have the drive able to update its own
> firmware).

Just for the record: we've upgraded CD burner firmware, and it works
by running some silly little program on DOS. No media involved.

We've updated/modified harddisk drive firmware. Same procedure: vendor
specific commands, and voila! (We're currently banging the hardware to
do this, possibly we might port to some passtrhough thingy later on)

I have vendor confirmation that turning on some consumer electronics
while holding a specific key combo will make the device boot (some
stage-2 boot) from the inserted CD instead of the firmware inside.
They use this to boot the "diagnostics" CD, but an "update firmware"
CD could obviously be made. 

	Roger. 

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