Update firmware of a Crucial SSD with systemd-boot

I bought this Crucial MX300 around two years ago and it has served me well. Today I (randomly) found out that I have not update the firmware for this drive for a long time now. I looked at the firmware page and, sure enough, there's a firmware update.

Grab firmware

There are two ways to update the firmware. The first way is to use a software on Windows, which is HUGE and slow. The other way is to use an ISO, which you are supposed to write to a USB flash drive and boot from there.

In order to update via Linux, we have to use the ISO way. The download link can be found here.

Find its secret

OK now we have the update ISO. Let's mount it and have a look. Still, if you don't know how to mount a ISO, here's how:

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sudo mount -t iso9660 MX300_M0CR070_Firmware_Update.iso /mnt/iso

Since the firmware is released at 2018, I'm pretty confident that it should support UEFI. And no surprise, it does. We can see our old friend - EFI folder here.

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$ cd /mnt/iso
$ ls -al
total 6
drwxr-xr-x 1 root root 2048 Nov 12  2018 .
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root   28 Oct 26 16:50 ..
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2048 Nov 12  2018 boot
dr-xr-xr-x 1 root root 2048 Nov 12  2018 EFI

Okay let's dig deeper… Wait.

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$ cat EFI/BOOT/grub/grub.cfg
GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=0
linux /boot/vmlinuz64 libata.allow_tpm=1 quiet base loglevel=3 cde waitusb=10 consoleblank=0 superuser mse-iso rssd-fw-update rssd-fwdir=/opt/firmware
initrd /boot/corepure64.gz
boot

It's just Linux! Booted by GRUB!

Well that's a surprise. From now on it's our routine Linux boot stuff. It seems that it is trying to boot the kernel vmlinuz64 and the payload corepure64.gz from /boot, so let's copy these stuff into our EFI partition.

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cp -r /mnt/efi/boot /boot

Then, add a new entry to systemd-boot. Edit /boot/loader/entries/ssd_update.conf:

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title Crucial MX300 Firmware Update
linux /Boot/vmlinuz64
initrd /Boot/corepure64.gz
options libata.allow_tpm=1 quiet base loglevel=3 cde waitusb=10 consoleblank=0 superuser mse-iso rssd-fw-update rssd-fwdir=/opt/firmware

That should be all we need.

Actually flash the firmware

Now we can reboot and choose the new boot entry we just created. And sure enough, it is Linux. To be specific, it is Tiny Core Linux. Actually quite appropriate if you ask.

Then it is the routine flash. Nothing special. Firmware get update, everyone is happy.

(No picture this time, it's just a boring flash. Even the font is same as our daily Linux tty font.)