BIOS Upgrade

BIOS Upgrade

When upgrading from a Windows installation, a BIOS upgrade is quite simple if you follow the IBM instructions, as described here.

For other operating systems there is an option to create a bootable floppy disk. This is described on the IBM site as well. Note that you still need some Windows, OS/2 or DOS-System to create the floppy disk. For Linux you can use DOSEMU for this.

The whole thing gets more complicated if you neither have Windows nor a floppy drive installed. This is what this page is intended to describe.

One solution is to extract the floppy disk image with Windows, OS/2 or DOS, and use this image as a boot image for a CD/DVD. Thus it should be possible to upgrade the BIOS with the built-in CD/DVD drive.

Be aware that IBM officially does not support this! The official statement to my support request was:

I'm afraid we only support the options listed on our web page and no you can't burn a CD/DVD, however you can try to use an external USB FDD (floppy) drive. The experts recommend a IBM USB FDD, however they have also tested it with a Sony USB FDD drive.

In order to make sure the drive is recognised you can boot up the FDD with a bootable dos diskette for w98

But it seems to be possible as Mathias Dalheimer describes this here.

To get an overview which models have been tested with this version, here is a list:

Does work:

- R31 tested by Mathias Dalheimer

Does not work:

- none known until now.

Please note that testing this is at your own risk!!!