DISCUSSION: Upgrade Plextor Firmware with UDEV and pxupdate How-to

This thread is to discuss the article titled: Upgrade Plextor Firmware with UDEV and pxupdate How-to

The links proper are:

http://www.plextor.be/technicalservi...oice=Downloads

and

ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/fi...6-pc-linux-gnu

Hi, I tried the pxupdate tool and followed the guide exactly with a Plextor 716A device and it failed to flash the device. I'm running AMD64 Gentoo with the 2.6.11-r8 kernel. I used the BartPE win32 livecd instead so my unit is flashed at least. Anyone else who had any luck with this tool?

pxupdate is for i686(x86) architecture. There isn't one for 64-bit AMD as far as I can tell. You can email the author for a recompile or advice.

schilling@fokus.fraunhofer.de

Two remarks:

(1) Does pxupdate work for serial ata devices (PX 716SA) ?

(2) You mention plextor's reluctance of provinding .bin files.
I've found a solution: run the .exe upgrade with wine.
Just leave the opening screen as is, and in a shell, retrieve
the .bin file from wine's windows/temp dir, as in :

$ cd ~/.wine
$ find . -name \*.bin -print
./drive_c/windows/temp/pft258~tmp/rome_109.bin

Bram

SATA is detected as a /dev/sda device- which is SCSI. It will actually work better.. or as it was meant to work in the first place. And I tried the extract option for the exe with cabextract, but got no dice on the PX-716AL that I have. Guess I'll just wait.

I have been trying and trying and ... to get the plextor 716a firmwawre flashed on my linux/fedora box. I have tried the various pxupgrade command lines suggested above without success. pxupgrade loads the bin file into memory and fails with "Error upgrading drive" -- hardly informative. Example:


sudo /usr/local/sbin/pxupdate 716a109.bin dev=ATA:1,0,0
___________________________________________________________________________
| PXUpdate V1.39 J�g Schilling 04/11/01 |
| Based on V1.12 (c) PLEXTOR SA/NV (EUROPE) 99/11/9 |
| Port to UNIX (c) J�g Schilling 99/11/15 |
| Plextor Firmware Update program |
___________________________________________________________________________
scsidev: 'ATA:1,0,0'
devname: 'ATA'
scsibus: 1 target: 0 lun: 0
Warning: Using badly designed ATAPI via /dev/hd* interface.
Linux sg driver version: 3.5.27
Upgrade file for PX-716A loaded
WARNING!
Firmware updates should be done in single user mode.
If you cannot put your machine into single user mode,
unmount and remove any media from the drive and stop
volume management.

Continue? (y/n) y
Current firmware version: 1.08
Upgrade PX-716A (HA:1 ID:0) in progress...Done
New firmware version : 1.08
Error upgrading drive

I also tried the wine approach and did not get much further.
Suggestions?

Fedora: 2.6.14-1.1637_FC4

A possible related problem. With the new DVD drive, 716a, k3b fails to burn cds. ...and I am not able to get checksums for source and CD destination files to match. (I did try to slow the burn speed.)

Suggestions?

Thanks,
Eric

Originally posted by ewest02
> I have been trying and trying and ... to get the plextor 716a firmware flashed
> on my linux/fedora box. I have tried > the various pxupgrade command lines
> suggested above without success. pxupgrade loads the bin file into memory
>and fails with "Error upgrading drive" -- hardly informative.

After spending much time (too much time) googling on the topic of plextor and
cd verification, I finally found some "hints". Apparently, enabling DMA is not
always a Good Thing (tm). In fact the hdparm man page contains

Using DMA nearly always gives the best per- formance, with fast I/O throughput and low CPU usage. But there are at least a few configurations of chipsets and drives for which DMA does not make much of a difference, or may even slow things down (on really messed up hardware!). Your mileage may vary.

I disabled the DMA for the device with

hdparm -d0 /dev/hdc

and
tried a couple of burns using xcdroast and cdrecord. (Yes, I know xcdroast uses
cdrecord...) Shazam! the md5sums for all the copied-to-CD files matched the
source md5sums. Lastly, I brought the machine to runlevel 1 (init 1) and retried
running pxupdate. This time there was success. pxupdate completed the
firmware update without error. To keep the DMA disabled for the burner, I
added a line to my /etc/rc.local and rebooted.

...a final test. I successfully completed and verified a burn using k3b with DMA
disabled. Prior to the DMA state change, k3b had become all but useless for
my system.

Voila!

Interesting that it took after DMA was turned off. I got it to upgrade on the 716AL via, believe it or not, vmware 5. Risky and dumb, but it worked. It has kernel userland drivers so it grabs the hardware directly. I should have looked at DMA first though. Major oversight.

It is a very clear 'howto' to update the firmware. Still I had some trouble. With 'init 1' I tried to use 'pxupdate 712A107.BIN dev=ATAPI:0,1,0', but I got the response 'Access denied'. Obviously I did something wrong but what? As root I typed 'init 1'. Can someone help me?

Originally Posted by edvdrmark It is a very clear 'howto' to update the firmware. Still I had some trouble. With 'init 1' I tried to use 'pxupdate 712A107.BIN dev=ATAPI:0,1,0', but I got the response 'Access denied'. Obviously I did something wrong but what? As root I typed 'init 1'. Can someone help me?

Does it help if you do:

pxupdate 712A107.BIN dev=ATA:0,1,0

instead?
the ATAPI interface is deprecated in recent linux
kernels in favor of "ATA", in fact when you did the :

cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus

I'm sure you saw cdrecord complain that the ATA is
preferred over ATAPI and ATAPI isn't maintained anymore.

Try
cdrecord dev=ATA -scanbus

to see your id numbers again,then if
they are 0,1,0 do

pxupdate 712A107.BIN dev=ATA:0,1,0


in fact, I think nowadays you can do

pxupdate 712A107.BIN dev=/dev/hdc

cdrecord itself understands:

cdrecord 712A107.BIN

if you have your /etc/cdrecord.conf setup to
define the "CDR_DEVICE" (mine just says
CDR_DEVICE=cdrom and then later defines
that to be /dev/cdrom. But I don't know if
pxupdate would look in /etc/cdrecord.conf

Mark

Plextor PX-716A.

My experience was much like that of ewest02 in posts #7 and #8, above. Upgrading from version 1.08 to 1.09. After disabling DMA, the firmware upgrade worked fine. After the reboot, I tried to create an .iso with DMA enabled. Checksum failed. Disabled DMA, burned the same .iso ... checksums matched.

I suspect that I could have left the firmware alone, and just disabled DMA on the CD Writer and I'd have been fine, as well.

Thanks for the Howto, Thoreau ... very easy to follow. Only step missing may be the need to "chmod u+x pxupdate". That was pretty easy to figure out, tho.

You can also you pxfw of the QPxTool. I don't know how well it works, but it's there.

http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/
http://qpxtool.sourceforge.net/download.html


How can I update the Plextor firmware with pxfw?

* 'su'
* 'tar xjvf pxfw-0.2..1tar.bz2'
* 'cd pxfw-0.2.1'
* 'make'
* 'chmod o+x pxfw'
* './pxfw /dev/hdX firmware.bin -u'

After much nagging for the past few years, the tech support people have posted ISO's for firmware updates for their plextor drives. It's in the firmware download section of plextor's site. Here is the email snippit.

Here is what we got from our Engineering
All,

I just had posted .iso image files for the 716, 755, and 760 drives.
These allow the firmware to be updated to the latest versions without
using the Windows operating system. The drive is put into a self
flashing mode and the image flashes the firmware. I've had this
available for our replicator and OEM customers and non-Windows users may
find this more user-friendly than trying to find a PC with Windows.

If customers need versions other than the latest, let me know and I can
provide images for those versions. This is only available for the three
drives listed. Other drives do not have this feature.

FYI, the 1.11 firmware for the 716 will be released next week. It has
minor bug fixes and a fix to correct a UDF problem that exists in Vista.
Not a drive problem, an OS problem corrected by firmware...you know, the
900 pound gorilla scenario.

Originally Posted by Thoreau It's in the firmware download section of plextor's site.

Have they removed it from their website? I've searched through their site and cannot find anything that looks like it.

bgoodr