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By Thoreau at 2005-04-18 03:23
I just wanted to post a solution to a problem that I've been having since Jeorg Schilling got drop-kicked for kernel native ATAPI support. Here is a list of steps to upgrade your Plextor Firmware on modern udev based systems.

1. Get the firmware:

Plextor is a real pain in the ass about releasing non-windows firmware. One division of Plextor though releases the .bin format of it's new firmware. You should get it here:

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

Grab your .bin and continue.

2. Get pxupdate

Pxupdate is part of cdrecord- but not bundled with it. The newest version for linux can be gotten here:

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

The versions may or may not change in the future, so just download it from the root directory if this link dies.

As a convenience, you can do a 'mv pxupdate-1.39-i686-pc-linux-gnu pxupdate'. Then do a:

chown root pxupdate
chgrp root pxupdate
cp pxupdate /usr/sbin

This will allow your system to have easy access to upgrade your firmware as it become available.

3. Make sure cdrecord is installed. It's still commonly available. Run this command as root:

cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus

Make note of the SCSI/ATAPI ID of the drive in which you want to upgrade. The format for the next step is based on the SCSI ID, which follows this example: dev=ATAPI:0,0,0

4. As root, type init 1. This is very important. you do not want system processes running during the firmware upgrade. It's a bad thing(tm).

Go to the directory where your .bin is located, and type:

pxupdate myfirmware.bin dev=ATAPI:X,X,X(where the X=the ID shown for your device)

5. Wait until it completes. Do a 'shutdown -h now'. Power down. Power your machine back up.

Check the firmware revision by re-entering the command: cdrecord dev=ATAPI -scanbus

You should now be good to go with the latest goodness without having to pop your drive into a Windows box.

If you have any problems or caveats, please post them and their resolution or lack thereof as a follow-up.

by Thoreau on Fri, 2005-04-22 02:12
The links proper are:

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

and

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

by razor1394 on Thu, 2005-05-12 16:43
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?

by Thoreau on Fri, 2005-05-13 02:05
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

by b.stolk on Fri, 2005-10-28 03:51
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

by Thoreau on Fri, 2005-10-28 03:55
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.

by ewest02 on Sat, 2005-11-26 15:31
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

by ewest02 on Sun, 2005-11-27 11:57
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

Quote:
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
Code:
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!

by Thoreau on Mon, 2005-12-05 10:29
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.

by edvdrmark on Sun, 2006-01-29 08:04
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?

by markos on Sun, 2006-03-26 13:20
Quote:
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


  



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