Talk:BIOS update without optical disk

Freeze when booting from USB drive

I attempted a BIOS upgrade on a ThinkPad X200s using the steps described on this page. Since no Linux is installed on the ThinkPad (only Vista 64-bit), I used a USB drive I prepared on another computer. The drive was formatted as plain FAT and contains nothing but GRUB, the memdisk executable and the image extracted with isobar. The laptop boots fine from the USB drive, GRUB loads and runs memdisk, which takes over and prints some debug information about memory addresses, disk layout and interrupts. Finally the following lines appear:

Loading boot sector... booting...
Lenovo Group Limited

Starting PC DOS...

Unfortunately, nothing happens after that. I attempted this with BIOS 3.01 (6duj30uc.iso) and BIOS 2.06 (6duj08uc.iso, the exact one used in the instructions). GRUB and syslinux are both up to date, obtained from the repositories of the recently released Ubuntu 9.04. I also tried the isobar32.exe from the OMIBAR32 package on the SHSUCD website, again to no avail (however, the resulting images had a different checksum). Any ideas? --Nor 21:26, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

I also had no luck booting memdisk from a USB stick (syslinux works OK), will try it again. As for the different checksums for isobar32.exe and isobar-for-linux -- the images also have different sizes. I found and fixed a bug in the original isobar32.exe that might potentially corrupt the image (instead of "start sector address"+"size of the first partition" it dumps only "size of the first partition", so if there is a useful info in the last 32 sectors or so -- isobar32.exe will loose it). --newhren 13:36, 16 May 2009 (UTC)