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

bios/controller update sequence

The article says: "If you go through the readme's on the IBM site they'll cleary state that you must update the Control Program first, then imediately update the BIOS"

When I look at the IBM udpate instructions for the T23, it says: "If you need to update the BIOS as well as the Embedded Controller Program, update the BIOS first."

Comments?

Firmware upgrade for Intel minipci combo card

I just purchased an Intel 10/100 Ethernet Mini-PCI Adapter with 56K Modem that has an ancient (2.0.6) firmware version. I Downloaded the update file intlbtag.EXE but cabextract was unable to find any cabfiles inside it. I tried running the program via wine and that didn't work either.

Finally I ran the program on a windows machine and created a boot floppy. Then I went through the the process of converting the floppy to a bootable cd via linux and that worked like a charm. The cd successfully updated the minipc card's firmware.

Everything worked but I ended up needing a windows box to do it. Could this have been done without windows?