Remco Barendse <redhat at barendse.to> wrote: > Thanks for the tips. I don't know if I'd want an extra > partition on all my servers. Reserving 1-8GB at the front of my server's array volume has saved my bacon so many times -- DOS for firmware upload, vendor diagnostic tool, helper Linux install for recovery, etc... > An alternative idea, create a DOS boot disc with the > firmware update, burn that as a bootable cdrom and > perform the upgrade. Assuming you have at least CD-ROM drive. ;-> And sometimes there can be issues with that. E.g., ServerWorks ServerSet III southbridges were not always well known for their "good" ATA support. > I tried that last week but for some reason the cd didn't > boot but that's probably more because I goofed up creating > the cd :) Instead of dorking with all that, I can plop down the dd image. I purposely leave an unused /dev/hda1 of cylinders 1-79 (assuming 255/63 heads/sectors) in case I do need to plop down that dd image. In many cases, I go ahead and set it up anyway -- just in case (leaving /dev/hda2 for any possible Linux install as a "helper" system). Once it's there, copying over a vendor firmware .com/.exe and other files is a matter of mounting /dev/hda1 as msdos (not vfat ;-), and plopping it. No CD building issues. > And I don't care about the cost of a cd recordable compared > to not upgrading the controller What I care about is the only 5 seconds it takes me to mount the msdos filesystem, copy the vendor firmware .com/.exe and other files, and then unmount versus the minutes to put together a boot CD or USB image. -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)