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Trying to update SSD Firmware without an optical drive

L

Links77

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jan 13, 2005
18
0
Hello clever people, I need some help!

I have a 2011 13inch MacBook Pro, I moved the stock HDD into the optical bay and put in a Crucial C300 128gb SSD as my startup disk.
It all went smoothly and works great! except for the documented problem with the C300 where it will freeze up for about 20 seconds every once in a while.

Crucial have updated their firmware to fix this exact problem so I'd like to update, but to do so I need to burn an iso to a CD and boot from it to update the firmware. This would be fine if I still had an optical drive!

Can any clever people suggest a way I can apply the firmware update without messing around with the internals of my machine again??

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!! Thank you :)
 
Assuming you still have the optical drive, buy an external enclosure from OWC and attach via USB.
 
Links77 said:
Can any clever people suggest a way I can apply the firmware update without messing around with the internals of my machine again??
Click to expand...

Can't be done. You need to burn the .iso to a cd.

Borrow/buy an external drive or enclosure, burn your cd, boot from it and update...
 
Borrowing or buying an external drive would be your best bet. Aren't there options to buy an enclosure for the superdrive? Thats probably your best bet.
 
I tried my superdrive put in an external enclosure and a 'regular' external drive...

Neither would boot up on my 2011 15" Macbook Pro. I had to take the C300 out and put in in an old Macbook with an internal drive - and it updated just fine.
 
PackFan said:
I tried my superdrive put in an external enclosure and a 'regular' external drive...

Neither would boot up on my 2011 15" Macbook Pro. I had to take the C300 out and put in in an old Macbook with an internal drive - and it updated just fine.
Click to expand...

Wow. That sure puts a big kink in the plan for an external superdrive. Bummer. Wonder why ... seems that this should work just fine?
 
Don't know if this works or not but you could check into it as well: maybe you have a friend who has a macbook and you could use their computer to burn the iso. And maybe you have a 2.5" ext enclosure which you could put the SSD in, and then use their computer to hook it up to and boot off the disk in their machine.... maybe? I dunno. It's a thought. Anybody know if this will work?
 
Links77 said:
Hello clever people, I need some help!

I have a 2011 13inch MacBook Pro, I moved the stock HDD into the optical bay and put in a Crucial C300 128gb SSD as my startup disk.
It all went smoothly and works great! except for the documented problem with the C300 where it will freeze up for about 20 seconds every once in a while.

Crucial have updated their firmware to fix this exact problem so I'd like to update, but to do so I need to burn an iso to a CD and boot from it to update the firmware. This would be fine if I still had an optical drive!

Can any clever people suggest a way I can apply the firmware update without messing around with the internals of my machine again??

Any suggestions greatly appreciated!! Thank you :)
Click to expand...
First of all, is the firmware update destructive? This article describes a C300 firmware update that causes the drive to lose all stored data.
 
Loops said:
First of all, is the firmware update destructive? This article describes a C300 firmware update that causes the drive to lose all stored data.
Click to expand...

According to Crucial's guidelines the latest update is non-destructive.

Is there any way of running the update from either the HDD in the optical bay or from a USB stick? Can either of these be bootable?
 
I have not tried this myself, but can you use the ISO to create a bootable USB thumb drive and do the upgrade that way?
 
It didn't work for me.

I burned the iso on another machine and the bootloader on the cd would run, but the linux img wouldn't load.

I had a similar problem when trying to apply updates to my old Vertex drives. I think I remember reading that the isolinux setup that was used to run the updater wasn't compatible with booting off of USB on a Mac, or something to that effect. I don't think it would matter if it was a USB optical drive or a USB flash drive.

Just for laughs I tried restoring the iso onto a USB flash drive and Disk Utility wouldn't allow it, complaining that the image couldn't be verified and that it was missing the checksum.

My drives are running fine, so I'm going to keep rolling with the 006. If I was the OP, I'd just put the Superdrive back in and get the C300 running. If this new fw does in fact solve his particular problem, doing some musical drives would be well worth it.
 
Weaselboy said:
I have not tried this myself, but can you use the ISO to create a bootable USB thumb drive and do the upgrade that way?
Click to expand...


Unfortunately Macs are very finicky about booting from usb. I tried for a long time to get ubuntu to boot from USB (and firewire) using rEFit - never worked. I have read of one person who got it to work, but it required creating another boot partition the internal drive.

This guy found a way around the efi issues, but I am not sure if it would work for the OP's purposes.
 
Thanks

Thanks for your help guys. It seems there's no easy way to do this without opening up my MBP, so I guess that's what I'll be doing!

One last question, if I take my SSD out and put it in an old MacBook (I don't really want to put the optical drive back in, that was quite tricky to remove in the first place), can I update the firmware using the MacBook, then put it back in my MacBook Pro? Or is that going to mess stuff up??

Thanks :)
 
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