On Fri, 04 Jun 2004 07:53:28 -0700, Joseph wrote:

> There is a flash utility (but whether it's "usable" has yet to be
> determined) available on HPs site, but it requires that you be in Windows,
> and have installed the Windows utilities that ship with the drive. I was
> hoping HP wasn't married and in bed with Microsoft, but they appear to be.
> There is no elegant floppy that would be independent of the operating
> system for flashing the drive.

It might not be worth the effort. Try
/usr/sbin/hdparm -i /dev/cdrom
and it should (among other things) tell you your firmware version under
"FwRev=" so that you can see whether it is up to date or not.
Also they usualy say what issue (which media) did they address with the
update. (At least NEC - I have one of their drives - does that. I actually
was lucky for they provided DOS flash utility for their ND1300. I am not
lucky any more with ND2500 now.)

I do not understand it since Win seems a lot less safe and stable for
flashing firmware then anything else. And DOS would be better choice for
it can be booted from a single floppy... Wine is a good project usable for
many tasks but this one, I am afraid, is not among them. The only
solution I could think of (however shameful is that) was taking the drive
to someone else and use his computer to flash it. Well at least you can
say if anyone picks on linux and HW (flashing is drive producer's problem
anyway) is that it was first to provide USB 2.0 support and unlike win..
it's bin released for x86-64 platform quite a while ago. Not that it
would really help with the drive.

I do not have any DVD+R at hand, but will try and let you know if I come
across some.