Windows 7 VM - Direct access to Hard Drives to flash SSD firmware

[Steve]

I need to run Samsung Magician software in Windows to flash the firmware of the SSD's I put in the laptop, is there any special way I need to setup the Windows VM to give direct access to the firmware

[Ángel]

Steve wrote

> I need to run Samsung Magician software in Windows to flash the firmware of the SSD's I put in the laptop, is there any special way I need to setup the Windows VM to give direct access to the firmware
>

I don't think that is going to work at all. If you really need to do
that, I would install Windows 7 in a different partition/disk, boot from
that, and flash the firmware from there.

[Tai...@gmx.com]

On 01/12/2017 07:52 AM, Steve wrote:

> I need to run Samsung Magician software in Windows to flash the firmware of the SSD's I put in the laptop, is there any special way I need to setup the Windows VM to give direct access to the firmware
>

You would have to attach to the VM with IOMMU the storage controller
that the drive is connected to,

Obviously you can't do that if you are also using this controller for
your OS, without some ramdisk magic which is possible with some effort
but if you have the money it would be cheaper to simply buy an
Expresscard controller that supports SATA (fyi SAS almost always
includes SATA)

In the future don't buy crappy consumer level devices that only provide
a windows flashing utility.

[Steve]

Thank you for the ExpressCard suggestion, that is possible. I also have two internal mSata slots and will check whether they are on a different controller than the main SATA