BIOS Upgrade

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Updating from within Windows

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

Updating from Floppy Disk

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 a Windows, OS/2, or DOS system to create the floppy disk; if you do not have access to any of those operating systems, you can download bootable Windows/DOS floppy images from Bootdisk.com. Alternately, you can use DOSEMU with FreeDOS directly on Linux. As some of the latest releases of the BIOS installers no longer run as a DOS program, you may want to try using Wine to extract the image. There is even a special version for Linux available for some ThinkPad models.

Downloads

Models	Non-Diskette		Diskette
	BIOS	Embedded Controller Program	BIOS		Embedded Controller Program
			Windows	Linux
A31, A31p	44450	45662	44451	45898	45663
G40	50672		50673
R40 (2681, 2682, 2683, 2896, 2898, 2899)	46055	46143	46061		46144
R40 (2722, 2723, 2724, 2897)	50320	46143	50321		46144
R40e	50302	50344	50301		50343
R50/p, R51 (1829, 1830, 1831, 1836), T40/p, T41/p, T42/p	50273	50279	50275		50277
R50e	55000	54996	55001		54997
R51 (2883, 2887, 2888, 2889, 2894, 2895)	55003	54996	55004		54997
T30	42694	42711	42720	45745	42725
X31	50298	53480	50308		53479
X40	53881	53882	53883		53885

Updating from CD/DVD Drive

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.

Another indication that it should work is that IBM uses PHLASH16.EXE (at least on T4x/p systems) to flash the BIOS into the chip. The same tool is used by other vendors to flash the BIOS from bootable CD-ROMs.

WARNING! Do not use the SYSLINUX image-loader MEMDISK to boot the images! Some flash tools crash in that situation!

Some interesting but very technical information about the used flash tool can be found here.

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

Does work:

Model	Tested by
R31	Mathias Dalheimer
T40p	Lukas Krähenbühl, ismo at pop dot agri dot ch
T42p	Robert Schiele <rschiele@uni-mannheim.de>, Joern Heissler <joern@heissler.de>

Does not work:

Model

Tested by

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

Updating with Network Boot Image

BIOS, Embedded Controller (EC), CD/DVD and Harddisk firmware disks can be booted over the network with PXELINUX as part of the SYSLINUX package.

This requires that you have a DHCP and tftp server configured and setup properly on your network, and is probably not for the faint of heart.

Make sure the firmware bootdisk is in linux 'dd' format, as the self-extracting .exe disks from the IBM website cannot be booted directly as such.

This worked on the R31, X22, T21, T30 and T41p with various firmware updates.