I'm currently working on getting some Supermicro X8DTT blades upgraded on their BIOS, LSI Raid, IPMI firmware sets.
IPMI was the first thing to be tackled. The existing version, 2.x something, just would not communicate with the LAN. The support people suggested performing a manual upgrade. So, the next question, is how to build a bootable flash drive?
That turned out to be quite easy. Rufus creates "Create bootable USB drives the easy way". It comes with FreeDOS as part of the toolset. Simple. Choose an external USB drive, and install. Then copy over the necessary BIOS burning utilities. Then boot the target machine with the USB drive.
The only draw back with Rufus, is that it requires an external, physical USB drive. It won't create an on disk .iso or .img file. This would be so convenient.
It becomes a bit more challenging to create an on-disk .iso file. The solution comes from CrashMAG.
From FREEDOS Ripcord BootDisk, download FDOEMCD.builder.zip. Unzip to your local drive. It will create a directory structure startingwith FDOEMCD, and will have a sub-directory called CDROOT. This is where the various flash utilities will go.
If running a 32 bit operating system, you should be able to run mkisofs.exe to create an iso. For 64 bit operating systems, go to smithii.com/cdrtools and download cdrtools-latest.zip. From this archive, extract 'mkisofs.exe' and 'cygwin1.dll' and put them into the FDOEMCD directory, over-writing the existing mkisofs.exe file.
After the CDROOT drive is populated with the necessary files, mkisofs.exe can be executed. This will create an .iso file in the FDOEMCD directory ready for remote mounting via IPMA or ILO clients.
Another interesting utility is WinImage. Given an existing image file, this can be used to add and subtract file from it. But you already need an existing image.
I came across ultimatebootcd but havn't really evaluated it.
Free Boot Disks has a list of free boot disks to be downloaded.
Ltr Data has a bunch of interesting utilities. By far the most interesting, for this moment, is ImDisk Virtual Disk Driver. It beats Daemon Tools hands-down. Not only will it open and mount existing images, but empty pre-allocated files in a folder can be created. The file can be mounted, formatted, and then files placed into it. Very light weight and quick. Raymond P. Burkholder in MS Windows at 19:51 | Comments (0)