USB stick for Fujitsu Firmware update

Note: these instructions are not the official Fujitsu instructions; use at your own risk.

Firmware update and bootable USB sticks

Fujitsu offers some tools to keep system firmware up-to-date with the help of a bootable USB stick. With some trial-and-error I got the USB stick to boot and work correctly even without using the Windows tools they provide.

There are two steps to making a USB stick; the stick itself, and the Firmware to put on it.

Creating a bootable USB stick

Download the ServerView Update DVD Base from the Fujitsu support site. This large zipfile packs two directories and an instruction manual (PDF document):

* USB-Stick-Data/ contains the data to be copied to the stick,
* Build-Tools/ contains the tools to format the USB stick.

Although the format tool is Windows based, the tooling itself is just syslinux so it can be run from Linux as well.

Use a large-ish USB stick (at least 8GB) formatted with a single partition and a FAT32 file system. Take note of the label to use for the file system as mentioned in USB-Stick-data/syslinux/syslinux.cfg; in my case this was UPD_121802 so set it with a command like

fatlabel /dev/sdb1 UPD_121802

if /dev/sdb is your USB stick. Run syslinux on the partition to copy the correct data for the bootloader

syslinux -i /dev/sdb1

and write the syslinux mbr to the device so it knows what to boot

dd if=/usr/lib/SYSLINUX/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdb bs=440 count=1

Copy all files under USB-Stick-Data to the root directory of the usb stick.

Preparing the updates

Download the Fujitsu Software ServerView Content Collector and unpack the zip file. This contains a single jar file which can be run with any java:

java -jar ContentCollector.jar

which opens a GUI. Point the tool to the directory where the USB stick is mounted. It will write its results to the Firmware directory. The tool allows you to make a subselection of updates based on the type of system you wish to update. This reduces the amount of data to be written to the stick.

When the tool is done, eject the stick and it's ready to use in a Fujitsu server. Boot it with the stick attached and press F12 to launch the boot manager. Select the stick from the menu of boot options and it should launch into a GUI and present the relevant updates for the machine it detects.