I had no luck applying the latest (Dec 2009) firmware using the ISO image, but used the USB work-around with great success. I have a Lenovo ThinkStation D10 with two G2 160GB SSDs in a RAID 0 configuration. I burned the firmware update image to CD ROM and left it in the DVD drive. Upon rebooting, disabling the onboard RAID controller in the BIOS (no need to muck with the actual RAID configuration!) and booting to CD ROM, the firmware update OS loaded, but reported an error message about "illegal partition". A few errors were barfed out at OS load time but eventually the firmware update tool started. It found the first SSD and successfully confirmed the present firmware level and serial number. But after confirming to apply the firmware update the computer hung. Subsequent re-attempts failed with the same scenario. I dumbed down the IDE settings from AHCI to legacy, but had problems booting even into the firmware. I found a combination of BIOS settings that successfully booted the firmware upgrade from CD ROM without the illegal partition errors, but the utility cound no longer find the SSDs. (Were the OS partition errors related to the IDE/AHCI settings?).
The solution was to give up on the CD ROM and follow the instructions posted elsewhere in this forum (/thread/8906 How to REALLY update Intel SSD firmware (02HD) from USB flash drive) which walks through how to create a bootable USB memory stick with the firmware update. I was subsequently able to boot from USB and apply the firmware with the BIOS IDE settings set to AHCI. After upgrading the 2 SSDs and re-enabling the RAID controller in the BIOS, the OS (Windows 7 64-bit) booted up fine.
Hope this post may help others.
Now Intel, when can we expect RAID drivers that can handle the TRIM directive??????
-cormandy
