Sunday, August 2, 2020

Crucial SSD BIOS update

Executive summary: If Crucial Storage Executive can't see your Crucial drive, you may be able to fix that by re-running as Administrator. 

Windows 10 continues to be a nightmare. The latest update has caused my machine to go wonky and it was suggested that, for reasons unknown, my SSD boot drive needed a BIOS update. 

The drive in question is a Crucial MX500 CT500MX500 S SD1 and the BIOS update is from M3CR020 to M3CR023. 

I initially attempted to burn and boot from a DVD ROM, but that came back with an error: 

"could not find kernel image boot/vmlinuz64"

You would think that something whose sole purpose is to boot into one program could get that right. That is, you would think that this very basic thing would have been tested prior to release. Sigh. No doubt there is a tortured route to get that thing to boot, but for me there was an easier way. You would think that Crucial would have offered that up first rather than the burnable image, but not in my case. 

I then installed their Windows software -- Crucial Storage Executive. It cheerfully informed me that "no supported drives were discovered" even though it was launched from the Crucial drive in question and was running under an OS that was booted on it. 

So ... it turns out that even though the software was installed with Crucial's installation program, it does not launch with or ask for the appropriate permissions to read the drive. In my case, re-launching with "Run as Administrator" proved to be the solution. 

The BIOS update was finally able to be initiated and completed successfully in a couple of minutes. 

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ventoy user reported same issue when booting MX500_M3CR033.iso using USB Flash Drive.

Ventoy provided a vcfg file to fix the issue, e.g. https://github.com/ventoy/Ventoy/issues/723

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