firmware without the floppy
December 18th, 2008 Posted in Linux

In recent years I’ve been able to rid myself of floppy drives entirely.  The problem that I run into however is that occasionally my beloved hardware manufacturers still ship firmware or bios updates on a floppy for some insane reason.

Luckily the syslinux people are aware of this vendor oversight, and have a solution. Enter ‘memdisk’. Memdisk allows you to use grub or other bootloader of your choice to boot to your floppy image file, without actually using a floppy.  To do this,  there are a few simple steps you’ll need to perform.  I’ll assume for the sake of argument that your hardware vendor provides you the .img file for the floppy image.

    * Create a directory inside /boot called firmware
    * Copy the memdisk binary to /boot
    * Copy the vendor’s .img file containing your update to /boot/firmware
    * Edit grub and add the appropriate entries for memdisk. A sample is below.

title Firmware Update
        root(hd0,0)
        kernel /memdisk
        initrd /firmware/vendor-file.img

The root values for grub will depend on your setup. You’ll have to salt to taste, but you should be able to copy from existing entries in grub. The only limitation I’ve run into with this update style are multi-floppy updates. You can’t really use them with memdisk that I’m aware of. If anyone’s aware of a way to use multiple img files with memdisk, I’ll happily update with new information!