Firmware updates without a floppy

I've had to do some firmware updates lately. This isn't a very friendly process being a linux user (unless the manufacturer provides bootable iso images).

The firmware I needed to install came as a win32 self-extracting 'create a set of boot floppies' program. As I started running the program, I realized that the only windows box I had access to at the moment didn't have a floppy drive. Ugh. Searching led me to find this virtual floppy driver:

http://chitchat.at.infoseek.co.jp/vmware/vfd.html

It worked like a charm. I ended up with a floppy image file. After some more searching I found out how to create a bootable iso image from this floppy image:

http://www.troubleshooters.com/linux/floppy_image_on_cd.htm

From this article:

* As root, make sure there's a /mnt/test directory
* As root, mount -o loop,ro /scratch/linuxinst/m91inst/images/network.img /mnt/test
* The remainder of the steps are done as a regular user
* mkdir /tmp/floppycopy
* cp -Rp /mnt/test/* /tmp/floppycopy
* cp -p /scratch/linuxinst/m91inst/images/network.img /tmp/floppycopy
* mkisofs -pad -b network.img -R -o /tmp/cd.iso /tmp/floppycopy
* cdrecord dev=0,3,0 speed=12 blank=fast -pad -v -eject /tmp/cd.iso

It actually worked. It would be nice if all manufacturers provided bootable iso images for all their updates.

Sidenote: Be careful when updating the cd drive's firmware using a cd. IBM had a bootable iso image to update the cd's firmware which worked fine, but in my case, using an image on a cd that was designed for a floppy didn't work. Luckily running it again from a floppy fixed the drive.