Talk:BIOS Upgrade

I have disabled the hidden partition to make more space for linux (24G). I still have Windows on the 14G partition. Is it safe to upgrade the BIOS without the hidden partition? I want to get a newer BIOS to fix the annoying fan issue. Thanks

- yes don't worry about it. bios upgrades have nothing to do with whats inside the harddrive.

BIOS upgrade over PXE

Hi,

I have a Thinkpad X20 with a very early BIOS and Embedded Controller Program which I'd like to update. Currently, the only feasible way of doing this is over the network using PXE. I already have a fully functional PXE server using SYSLINUX, and have so far been able to boot the BIOS diskette image using MEMDISK, although I have not attempted to flash anything yet due to the warnings given on the page. Is there any safe way I can update both the Controller Program and the BIOS in the same session over the network in this manner? If not, what other methods would be suitable? I have a USB CD-ROM drive and could probably get hold of a USB floppy drive.

Thanks.

Update: I ended up burning CDs as described and successfully updated everything. I'd still like to know if there is a way I could do it entirely over the network, though.

RE: grub initrd

"Another possibility which works even without a CD-drive or network is to boot the disk image via the grub initrd mechanism."

0) Interesting suggestion. Might be better of in its own section.

1) Could you please elaborate?

2) My first guess (pending your elaboration) would be to "chainload" the first block of the diskimage using the grub commandline, like:

  blocklist (path)/to/diskimage
  chainloader blockvalue+1

But that's just a guess!

Paul Bolle Fri Jul 15 12:20:47 CEST 2005