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Comment by pentamassiv | Hacker News Reader

A few months ago I already updated my Samsung SSD by following this procedure: https://askubuntu.com/a/1386451. Theoretically they provide an image to boot from to do the update, but the image seems very outdated and did not recognize my keyboard so it was unusable.

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I now found and followed this:

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

And it seems to have worked. After extracting this updater tool and running it, smartctl kept showing the old firmware version (3B2QGXA7), but after reboot it now shows the new version (5B2QGXA7).

I took the risk of running this while the OS (Archlinux) was running with the disk mounted (this is the OS install disk), and at first sight this didn't cause issues. But still do it at your own risk!!

Thanks, but that takes me to old firmware. I was however able to download the new firmware from https://semiconductor.samsung.com/consumer-storage/support/t... and use the same procedure and it worked:

    ├─SSD 980 PRO 2TB:
    │     Device ID:          03281da317dccd2b18de2bd1cc70a782df40ed7e
    │     Summary:            NVM Express solid state drive
    │     Current version:    5B2QGXA7

My home is on non-redundant stripe of two 980 Pro which both had the bad firmware, so I was obviously motivated, but not panicked as it's replicated hourly to spinning rust (and I have offsite backups). I treat Flash memory as dynamic ram with only slightly better retention.

The command line example in the link shows the old firmware, but they do say to go to the samsung website and get the latest one there. The 980 was the first one in the list there under the Firmware section.

Also seems to have worked for me doing 3B2QGXA7→5B2QGXA7 in NixOS. Extract ISO, extract initrd, run fumagician, reboot.

The command can be simplified as

  isoinfo -R -i xxx.iso -x /initrd | gzip -dc | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames "root/fumagician*"

if you don't want to go through the mounting and extracting everything.

This worked for me, thanks! I have a Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB which I upgraded from 2B2QGXA7 to 5B2QGXA7. I backed up and also made a copy of the output of `sudo smartctl -t long -a /dev/nvme0` before and after.

For me `isoinfo` doesn't like the format of the .iso file ("CD-ROM is NOT in ISO 9660 format"). Using bsdtar worked though:

  bsdtar xOf xxx.iso initrd | gzip -dc | cpio -idv --no-absolute-filenames "root/fumagician*"

(And of course then running `root/fumagician/fumagician` in either case.)

I was trying to figure out why the update wasn't working on my Archlinux box. After a few attempts I barely caught a glimpse of an error message that flashed by: something along the lines of "unzip not found".

After installing unzip, the firmware updated successfully.

I think I managed to upgrade the firmware from within Kubuntu (it wasn't the OS Nvme) by using this method

https://blog.quindorian.org/2021/05/firmware-update-samsung-...

I've done it some months ago, so I don't remember if it was that one exactly.

I'm now relieved to know that 5B2QGXA7 is still the current one.

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