Hello All –
There seems to tstill be a lack of an official way to update our SSD drive firmware for Macs. There are a few convoluated solutions floating around via searches and old posts. With FW211 there still are posts asking the same questions, so I put together a working solution that isnt that hard and I have verified works on my own systems. There was a post over on crucial forums with a similiar method, however it missed a key step that inlcuded the copy of the actual firmware image over to the drive.
Requirements:
-Windows Based machine for running Universal-USB-Installer-1.8.7.8 (a VM running on Fusion/Paralells is fine, even if its on the same machine that you are updating
-Firmware download v211 for your respected drive model
-USB Drive 1 or 2GB, etc
-rEFit - Download from http://refit.sourceforge.net (will only need this temp)
Steps:
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On the Windows VM/machine download Universal USB Installer
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Download the firmware for your drive
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Download the rEFit tool, run it and install it on your machine, this is only needed temp, you can simply remove it once the drive is updated.
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Plug in the USB drive and make sure it mounts into the VM or Windows machine
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Format the drive manually via Windows Disk Utility (I prefer this over using the USB Installer app)
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Run the USB installer app on the Windows side, select Old Syslinux and select the ISO firmware file
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Once completed the drive will now have a bootable partiion along with the firmware image file needed for proper flashing
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Reboot your Mac and press COMMAND-C
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Using your keyboard arrow keys go to the right and select boot partition from USB “partition name”
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System should boot into the Linux Kernel and start the firmware image loader
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Proceed as normal
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Boot back into OSX and remove the EFI folder on the main OS drive and double check that the Startup Volume is the SSD drive (Settings - Startup Volume - verify what drive is checked)
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This puts the boot menu back to normal and your drive should also be updated.
I dont think this is missing anything, I did it quickly so let me know if you are having problems and I can try to help!
Jonathan