Thursday, February 3, 2011

Creating a FreeDOS USB boot stick for Samsung F4 Firmware updating.

As I wrote in my previous post, the Samsung F4 2 TB drive, Model HD204UI, Firmware Version: 1AQ10001 has a very nasty firmware bug that causes data corruption in the form of failed writes. Samsung only makes the firmware update available as a DOS exectuble (.exe).

Note: It should be possible to extract the .bin or .hex from that and use one of the fwupdate utilities that were popular for CD/DVD burners. I wasn't willing to risk bricking the drive, so I'll leave that to someone else. As I said, even with the firmware fix I'm considering returning the drive, because I find Samsung's handling of this matter difficult to put any faith in.

I was able to do the following. I followed the instructions on this page, written by Timo Heissenbttel to be a reminder for how to do this the next time it comes up. It uses syslinux and FreeDOS. Fortunately enough drivers are there that I was able to boot it on a Dell Poweredge without having to scramble to find lots of drivers. I was able to copy Samsung's F4EG.exe to the thumb drive, after formatting, partitioning, running syslinux and copying freedos to the drive.

Hope This Helps Somebody Else.

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