PXUPGRADE(1)

NAME
pxupgrade - upgrade firmware in Plextor CD/DVD writers

SYNOPSIS
pxupgrade [ options ] [ dev=device ] firmware_file

DESCRIPTION
Pxupgrade is used to update the firmware in Plextor CD and DVD writers as well as in the PX-40 CD-ROM drive.

See OPTIONS and EXAMPLES section to lean about possible usage.

  Device naming
Most users do not need to care about device naming at all, as pxupgrade implements auto target support and automagically finds Plextor drives.

The device refers to scsibus/target/lun of the CD/DVD-Recorder. Communication on SunOS is done with the SCSI general driver scg. Other operating systems are using a library simulation of this driver. Possible syntax is: dev= scsibus,target,lun or dev= target,lun. In the latter case, the CD/DVD-Recorder has to be connected to the default SCSI bus of the machine. Scsibus, target and lun are integer numbers. Some operating systems or SCSI transport implementations may require to specify a filename in addition. In this case the correct syntax for the device is: dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun or dev= devicename:target,lun. If the name of the device node that has been specified on such a system refers to exactly one SCSI device, a shorthand in the form dev= devicename:@ or dev= devicename:@,lun may be used instead of dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun.

To access remote SCSI devices, you need to prepend the SCSI device name by a remote device indicator. The remote device indicator is either REMOTE:user@host: or REMOTE:host:
A valid remote SCSI device name may be: REMOTE:user@host: to allow remote SCSI bus scanning or REMOTE:user@host:1,0,0 to access the SCSI device at host connected to SCSI bus # 1,target 0 lun 0.

Pxupgrade is completely based on SCSI commands but this is no problem as all CD/DVD writers ever made use SCSI commands for the communication. Even ATAPI drives are just SCSI drives that inherently use the ATA packet interface as SCSI command transport layer build into the IDE (ATA) transport. You may need to specify an alternate transport layer on the command line if your OS does not implement a fully integrated kernel driver subsystem that allows one to access any drive using SCSI commands via a single unique user interface.

To access SCSI devices via alternate transport layers, you need to prepend the SCSI device name by a transport layer indicator. The transport layer indicator may be something like USCSI: or ATAPI:. To get a list of supported transport layers for your platform, use dev= HELP:

To make pxupgrade portable to all UNIX platforms, the syntax dev= devicename:scsibus,target,lun is preferred as it hides OS specific knowledge about device names from the user. A specific OS may not necessarily support a way to specify a real device file name nor a way to specify scsibus,target,lun.

Scsibus 0 is the default SCSI bus on the machine. Watch the boot messages for more information or look into /var/adm/messages for more information about the SCSI configuration of your machine. If you have problems to figure out what values for scsibus,target,lun should be used, try the -scanbus option of cdrecord described below.

OPTIONS

-all
    Upgrade all drives which may be upgraded using the specified upgrade file.

dev=target
    Sets the SCSI target for the CD/DVD-Recorder, see notes above. A typical device specification is dev=6,0 . If a filename must be provided together with the numerical target specification, the filename is implementation specific. The correct filename in this case can be found in the system specific manuals of the target operating system. On a FreeBSD system without CAM support, you need to use the control device (e.g. /dev/rcd0.ctl). A correct device specification in this case may be dev=/dev/rcd0.ctl:@ .

    On Linux, drives connected to a parallel port adapter are mapped to a virtual SCSI bus. Different adapters are mapped to different targets on this virtual SCSI bus.

-l  List all Plextor drives with their current firmware version. This works only if the current OS platform allows SCSI bus scanning for user programs.

-help
    Prints a short summary of the pxupgrade options and exists.

-version
    Prints the pxupgrade version number string and exists.

EXAMPLES

Use

pxupgrade -all r412c106.bin

to upgrade all Plextor PX-W412 drives that may be found using the SCSI scan bus function of the OS.

Use

pxupgrade dev=3,0 r412c106.bin

to upgrade the Plextor PX-W412 drive at target 3 lun 0.

Use

pxupgrade -l

to list all Plextor drives with their firmware if the OS supports SCSU bus scanning.

Use

pxupgrade dev=USCSI -l

to list all Plextor drives with their firmware using the alternate SCSU transport method USCSI.

Use

pxupgrade dev=IOCompactDiscServices -l

On MacOS X to list the first CD-ROM drive in the system.

NOTES
If the update is done with an ATAPI drive and DMA is active, it is likely that the drive will hang after the firmware update as this operation puts the drive in PIO mode.