BIOS update without optical disk

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For recent models, such as Thinkpad X200, Lenovo provides both win32 "BIOS update utility" and iso-image of "BIOS Update (Bootable CD)". If you don't have Windows installed, the first option is obviously unavailable for you. If you have an optical drive of some kind (internal, or built into the docking station, or an external USB drive) you can burn the iso-image and proceed with the BIOS update. In case if you don't have any optical drive things get a little tricky.

A quick look at the BIOS Update (Bootable CD) iso-image shows that its iso9660 filesystem is empty and its bootimage is of BootMediaType=4, i.e. it is a harddisk emulation. Therefore non of the methods discussed in BIOS_Upgrade/X_Series would work. There are many Linux tools which extract bootimages from iso-images, but after a search over the net, I didn't any which works correctly with BootMediaType=4 (e.g. geteltorito form genisoimage package messes things up). I found, however, a free open-source DOS utility isobar from shsucd package. So, I just ported it to linux.

Now, to update the BIOS,

  • make sure that you have syslinux installed (we will need memdisk from this package)
apt-get install syslinux

gcc isobar.c -o isobar
  • extract the bootimage from the BIOS Update (Bootable CD) iso-image and copy it to the boot partition
./isobar 6duj08uc.iso -o bios.img
cp bios.img /boot/bios.img
  • copy memdisk loader to the boot partition
cp /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk /boot/memdisk
  • append the following lines to /boot/grub/menu.lst
title           BIOS update
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /memdisk
initrd          /bios.img
  • reboot, and in the grub menu choose the BIOS update option

Hard drive firmware update utility

Besides BIOS updates, Lenovo also provides Hard drive firmware update utility in the form of a bootable iso-image. Quick check shows that it has the same structure as above, i.e. empty iso9660 filesystem and bootimage of BootMediaType=4. So, naturally, one would think that we can boot it in the same way as above, via grub & memdisk. However, common sense tells that it is not a good idea to read the firmware from the same very harddrive whose firmware we are updating. But looking further into the structure of the bootimage we see that first it creates a RAMDRIVE, copies the update utility there, and launches it from the RAMDRIVE. So, it is actually OK to use grub. Tested on my X200.

Reported to work with

Thinkpad X200

Thinkpad X200 Tablet

Thinkpad X301

Hard drive firmware update

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