Flashing OA Firmware using SPP and an SD card

[chuckk281]

A question from a customer that Hadedh is looking to solve:

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I received the question below from a customer, and I need some help on it please:

Customer wants to upgrade the OA Firmware using the latest SPP which will be copied on a USB stick.

The issue is that SPP has a size of more than 4GB (4.69 GB). So USB must be formatted with NTFS (and not FAT32 …).

And as per the OA user guide:

Onboard Administrator supports USB keys formatted for FAT32 or EXT2 file systems. The maximum supported USB key size is 4GB.

Any suggestions please ?

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A suggestion from Chad:

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You can use EaseUS Partition Master to format the USB key directly in Windows to EXT2, no need for a Linux VM then use Ext2FSD to read/write to the key within Windows.

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And more suggestions from Karthik:

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• HP’s USB Key Utility seems to be formatting the “USB” to a FAT32 file-system. This utility creates a bootable USB and also untar’s the ISO file into multiple  files + directories. Bootable USB key’s are used to directly plug into a Blade and not via the USB on the OA.
• This results on individual files being smaller than 4gb and  hence can be flashed even though the single ISO file is larger than 4GB. 

• However if you want to store the SPP’s ISO image directly on the USB drive. You will now have to format the drive to “ext2”. “ext2” is the only file-system that is supported on the OA that supports file size’s greater than 4GB.The technique I use to flash ext2 is as below
• You may find a few ext2 formatting utilities that require a license.

1. Vmware player.  For booting of the GPARTED live cd.
2. Gparted live cd.  (http://gparted.org/ )  Used for formatting the actual USB drive.
3. Ext2fsd (http://www.ext2fsd.com/ , http://sourceforge.net/projects/ext2fsd/ )   Windows drivers required for accessing and updating files onto the ext2 formatted USB.

This would be the technique when you want to present an ISO file as a whole to be mapped

• You could also make a custom ISO to reduce the ISO file-size if you want to continue to use fat32.

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Other suggestions?