Where can I download the "HP USB Floppy Drive Key technologies technology brief"

[alnesbit]

Hello,

Does anybody know where I can get a copy of the "HP USB Floppy Drive Key technologies technology brief"?

This document has been referenced in another post on this community support forum.  See, for example, this post: Booting from USB Key .  One out of date link is http://bizsupport2.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01121465/c01121465.pdf .  Another is http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01121465/c01121465.pdf

It seems that I'm looking for a PDF document whose filename is c01121465.pdf .  Does anybody have a copy?

I am hoping that this document contains enough detail so I can write my own utility to bypass this nonsense.

Background context follows.

A MicroServer Gen8 won't boot a USB flash drive that has had a standard ISO 9660 image written to it.  It needs to be written in a special, HPE-specific way using a special utility that is apparently available on the HPE website and in the SPP itself.

I need this to work so I can apply the SPP in the way I need.  I also so that I can boot other ISO images.

This is a well known problem and I am now blocked.

I have checked all the usual things.  I am using a USB2 port and a USB2 flash drive; I have set SATA AHCI mode in the BIOS; I have carefully adjusted the order of my boot devices, etc.  The flash drives contain well formed ISO 9660 and carry standard headers.  They boot fine on other machines.

I don't intend to install an optical drive.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.  Thank you all!!

Kind regards,

Andrew

[Torsten.]

Which SPP do you want to apply?
The tool you need to create an USB stick is within the ISO image.

[alnesbit]

I am trying to apply SPPGen81.4 to my HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen8.

I have used the HP USB creator utility to make it bootable, but it looked like it only wrote a small fraction of the contents of the original SPP.

The main issue is the USB creator utility is a Windows application, and accessing Windows is difficult for me.  If I could do this on Linux it would be easier for me.

Most importantly, I would like to understand this crazy format that HPE requires just so ISO's written to USB drives will boot.  This needs to be documented properly so that alternative tools can be written to ease administration.  This is especially for the MicroServer Gen8, which is often used an entry-level server for beginners in server administration and creating homelabs, etc.

[Torsten.]

The included tool works on windows and linux.

[alnesbit]

How can I extract the LInux-version of the utility from the SPP ISO?  How do I then install it?  I am using Debian.  Thank you for helping me.

[Jimmy Vance]

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@alnesbit wrote:

Hello,

I am hoping that this document contains enough detail so I can write my own utility to bypass this nonsense.

Background context follows.

A MicroServer Gen8 won't boot a USB flash drive that has had a standard ISO 9660 image written to it.  It needs to be written in a special, HPE-specific way using a special utility that is apparently available on the HPE website and in the SPP itself.

Kind regards,

Andrew

---

There is no special magic.  The utility installs the syslinux bootloader (for non UEFI systems) on the key and then pretty much copies the contents of the ISO to the USB device. After the primary copy, it moves the initrd image, kernel, and few other files from the system directory to the root.  Before UEFI, the tools was able to hold more than one version of the SPP or other tools such as offline SSA on the same key. Due to UEFI security it no longer offers that option.   For UEFI systems, it boots from an .efi file in the /efi/boot directory.

You can also mount the ISO via iLO virtual media and run the SPP over iLO. Depending on your distribution, you can also  loop mount the ISO and run smartupdate locally if you have a GUI, or using the command line version of smartupdate.