BIOS Upgrade
Contents
This page is meant to describe ways to update the BIOS on a ThinkPad that only runs Linux for users that don't have ready access to Windows. If you have Windows on your ThinkPad you can just boot into it and follow instructions on the IBM website.
Before You Begin
Updating the BIOS in Linux (with few exceptions) is not officially supported by IBM/Lenovo. However there are work arounds.
Proceed at your own risk!
It is also important to understand that Thinkpads from IBM have two separate firmwares: the BIOS, and the Embedded Controller program. A given BIOS version will require a certain version of the Embedded Controller program.
The IBM documentation is sometimes unclear about the order in which these two firmwares should be updated. On most, but not all Thinkpads, the correct update order is Embedded Controller program first, and then the BIOS. Make sure to do the two updates immediately one after the other. Newer models from Lenovo update both the Embedded Controller program and the BIOS at the same time, so you don't have to worry about it.DMI IDs
Please consider updating the List of DMI IDs before (and after) updating your BIOS.
BIOS Upgrade Paths
For every firmware (either BIOS or Embedded Controller program) update on the IBM web site there used to be two different firmware update programs provided. The Diskette Updater and the Non Diskette Updater. For newer Lenovo Models the Diskette Updater is replaced with a bootable CD-Image and the Non Diskette Updater is renamed BIOS Update Utility, both of which update the BIOS and the Embedded Controller program at the same time. A list of links to firmware downloads can be found at BIOS Upgrade Downloads for nearly all Thinkpad Models.
The Diskette Updater
The Diskette updater appears to be a 16 bit DOS program which asks you to accept a license agreement. It will run in Windows, DOS, OS/2, or Dosemu perfectly, but requires a real floppy disk attached via a real floppy controller. A USB Floppy Drive will not work.
The flash environment can be a really dumb piece of work and it will be reading the data from the floppy as it goes, i.e. it is dangerous as all heck should the floppy reads fail. Use a clean (in the physical sense) floppy and floppy drive. Have two or more flash disks ready, all of them binary copies of each other, and all of them tested to be perfectly readable. And the only thing you can tell DOS without risking your ThinkPad, is to "Retry" if it asks.
Important floppy-drive knowledge for those who are not used to them:
- One floppy is never enough. Good quality ones are very dependable for short-time data storage when new, but chances are you'll be using either old or extra-shitty diskettes (good ones have not been manufactured for a long while now), so you cannot trust them at all
- When a floppy fails to read because you failed at the "use clean floppies" part, it may get dirt stuck to the drive head and will not work well until cleaned
- You can clean a floppy disk, but it requires much care as you must do it without using any fluids, and you only want to remove the dirt on top of the metal-oxide layer, without damaging said layer (i.e. you can't rub it, and you can't cause any scratches)
- Dirty driver heads sometime damage floppies. Wet driver heads always damage floppies. Clean the drive heads first, and make sure to wait until they dry before inserting a floppy in the drive
- You may need to clean the floppy drive head before it will work again if it gets dirty. You'll need the usual "floppy disk cleaner diskette with isopropil alcohol" kit to fix it (if you know the other way to clean the heads, you don't need to be reading this!), always telling DOS to "retry" (hit anything else, and your ThinkPad is likely toast)
- If you forget to let the head dry after a cleaning, it will destroy the next floppy it touches and get very dirty.
The Bootable CD Image
Newer models from Lenovo can be updated using the Bootable CD Image. This should be the easiest way for non-Windows users and also maybe a more secure way for Windows users, as well. As the image is provided as a plain ISO-file without any Windows enclosure, you can simply burn it to a CD-R/RW with any modern operating system, as long as you have a CD/DVD-RW Drive and are then able to boot from it.
Extracting a Bootable CD-ROM Image from the Non Diskette Updater
This installer appears to be a 32bit windows .exe which is designed for updating the BIOS directly from a running Windows OS. It turns out that this .exe is really a wrapper license program around Windows .cab files (see BIOS-Bootsplash). If you install the Linux program cabextract you can expand these .cab files directly. Run the following:
$ cabextract FILENAME.exe
This will extract 8 files in the current directory. One of them will be FILENAME.img. In this discussion, "FILENAME" represents the name of the Non Diskette file that you downloaded, such as "1NHJ04US".
The non Diskette download was not extractable for at least the version 3.23 (T41p), but the diskette version worked perfectly - cabextract delivered a .img file to continue here...
You can test that this is really a floppy image by running:
# mkdir mntfloppy# mount -o loop FILENAME.img mntfloppy# ls -la mntfloppy
If the results of # ls -la mntfloppy look like a dos floppy, and no read errors were displayed, you have a pretty good chance that the floppy image is usable.
Unmount the image after you are done:
# umount mntfloppy
Now, you can proceed to Creating a Bootable CD from a Floppy Image, below.
Booting the image with syslinux
Once the image is extracted from the Non Diskette Updater, it can be booted directly through GRUB without the need of burning a CD. This method has been tested on T42 with a broken DVD-ROM, but it should be applicable to any ThinkPad.
1. Download the Non Diskette Updater.
2. Extract the images using cabextract (see previous sections for details). Let's say that the image file is called 1RUJ37US.IMG (replace with the actual filename).
3. Make sure that syslinux package is installed in your system. Locate the memdisk file from the syslinux package. In case of openSUSE 11.1, it is placed in /usr/share/syslinux/memdisk. On Ubuntu 9.04, it can be found at /usr/lib/syslinux/memdisk.
4. Copy both the image and memdisk files into /boot directory. You must be root to do this.
# cp ./1RUJ37US.IMG /usr/share/syslinux/memdisk /boot/
5. Open /boot/grub/menu.lst in your favourite editor.
6. Copy the active section and edit title, kernel, initrd according to this example:
title IBM BIOS update
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd /boot/1RUJ37US.IMG
Updating via 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.
Creating a Floppy Image
If you have created a boot floppy on another machine, you need to create an image file of that floppy. This can be easily done in linux by running a command line:
# dd bs=2x80x18b if=/dev/fd0 of=/tmp/floppy.img
You can also create a floppy image by using Ken Kato's VMware's back. It is a free Windoze tool that creates a virtual floppy drive and allows you to produce an image file ready to be ISO'ed. Note: you might have to 'manually' (through application's interface) assign the virtual drive a volume letter in order to be seen by IBM's application (as, by default, it seems not to do it).
You should verify this floppy.img as explained above.
Creating a Bootable CD from a Floppy Image
Once you have your floppy image, either from imaging a real floppy, or from extracting them via the cabextract method above, you need to make a boot CD out of it.
The eltorito bootable CD standard is a wonderful thing. What this means is that a bootable CD can be made with a bootable floppy in such as way that the CD believes that it is a 2.88 MB floppy drive. This allows you to replace a boot floppy by a boot CD in nearly all situations.
It is very easy to create such a bootable CD ISO image in Linux using the mkisofs tool. To do this run a command as follows:
# mkisofs -b bootfloppy.img -o bootcd.iso bootfloppy.img
where bootfloppy.img is the name of the .img floppy image file, for example 1NUJ10US.IMG.
Note: This creates a CD with one file on it and marks that file as the boot image. For more info on this read $ man mkisofs.
You can now burn the bootcd.iso in your favorite CD burning program.
To get an overview which models have been tested with this version, here is a list:
Does work:
| Model | Tested by |
| 600E (2645-4AU) |
|
| 600E (2645-5bU) |
|
| 600X (2645) |
|
| 600X (2645) |
|
| A20p (2629-6VU) |
|
| A21e (2628-JXU) |
|
| A31p (2653) |
|
| A31 (2652) |
|
| R30 |
|
| R31 |
|
| R40 |
|
| R50 (1836-3SU) |
|
| R50e (1834-PTG) |
|
| R51 (1829) |
|
| R51 (1830-RM7) |
|
| R51 (2887) |
|
| R52 (1858) |
|
| T20 |
|
| T22 |
|
| T23 |
|
| T30 |
|
| T40 |
|
| T40p |
|
| T41 |
|
| T41p |
|
| T42 |
|
| T42p |
|
| T43 |
|
| T60 |
|
| T61 |
|
| X20 |
|
| X21 |
|
| X22 |
|
| X23 |
|
| X30 |
|
| X31 |
|
| X40 |
|
| Z60m |
|
Does not work:
| Model | Tested by |
Updating via Grub and a Floppy Image
Floppy images may be booted from Grub via a utility called MEMDISK, which may be compiled from the SYSLINUX source. Copy the compiled memdisk image and the floppy image to your boot directory and configure grub as follows:
title Bios Flash kernel /boot/memdisk initrd /boot/FILENAME.img
Again, proceed at your own risk.
MEMDISK worked
| Model | BIOS | ECP | Tested by | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| R30 2656-64G | v.1.40 | Yuri Spirin | ||
| R40 2723 | 1OHJ11WW.IMG | 1PUJ25US.IMG | Qunying | memdisk from syslinux 3.70 (slackware 12.1) |
| R51 2888 | ||||
| T40 2373 | 1RUJ37US.IMG | 1RHJ10U2.IMG | Euphoria | memdisk from syslinux 1:3.31-4 (Debian package version) |
| T40 2373 | 1RHJ10U2.IMG (3.04, 2004-11-15) |
1RUJ37US.IMG (3.23, 2007-07-03) |
Morphics | cabextract and memdisk from syslinux 3:1.36-4ubuntu5 |
| T41p 2373 | 1RUJ37US.IMG (3.23, 2007-07-03) |
Deggel | cabextract and memdisk from syslinux 3.71 on gentoo | |
| T41p 2373 | James Lee | |||
| X31 2673-CBU | Jan Topinski | |||
| X31 2672-CXU | TheAnarcat | |||
| X31 2673-58G | FaUl | |||
| X31 2672-PG9 | Starox | a big moment between starting update and the updating window | ||
| X40 2371 | 2.07 1uuj21us.exe | 1.62 1uhj10us.exe | Jakob Truelsen | Worked on two X40-2371 |
| X40 2386 | 2.08 1uuj22us.exe | 1.62 1uhj10us.exe | Galen Seitz | memdisk from syslinux 3.61 |
MEMDISK did not work
| Model | BIOS | ECP | Tested by | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| T43 2668-F7G | 1.29 1YUJ18US.IMG | Maus3273 | I got into the bios program, but the machine never restarts after initiating the upgrade. | |
| X41 2525-FAG | 2.09 74UJ15US | Uwe Kleine-König | booted fine (Debian syslinux 2:3.71+dfsg-5), but didn't succeed to write, just hang at "Don't restart or remove diskette etc. pp" (not bricked). Worked fine via CD method. | |
| X41 2525-F8G | 2.06 74UJ12US.IMG 2.07 74UJ13US.IMG 2.09 74UJ15US.IMG |
Lauri Koponen | hangs while initializing the actual BIOS flashing process ECP: 1.02 74HJ03US.IMG works |
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.
On X22, works with EC 1.30 but NOT with BIOS 1.32
After updating
DMI IDs
Please consider updating the List of DMI IDs after (and before) updating your BIOS.
Check List
The following is important to remember:
- You must update both the Control Program and the BIOS at the same time if your current Control Program is not compatible with the new BIOS (see below)
- You must find versions of the Control Program and BIOS that are compatible. Not all of them are, so follow the readmes on the IBM website carefully to determine which are.
- You must update the Control Program before you update the BIOS
When the Control Program and the BIOS need updating, have both update disks or CDs ready. Update the Control Program first and the system should switch itself off when finished. Insert the BIOS update disk and proceed to update the BIOS. When it's all finished, enter setup, reset the settings to their defaults and reboot. Enter setup again and tweak the settings as necessary.
