[HOWTO] UEFI/BIOS update from USB w/o CD

  • Your vendor releases a UEFI/BIOS update image for CD
  • ...but your machine does not have a CD
  • So basically what has to be done is to get this image to boot from another media, i.e. USB
  • ...but the relevant update utilities and data on the CD are hidden by a special setup.
  • The sysutils/geteltorito solves this issue.
Replace "jbuj73wd" with the name of the BIOS file you downloaded, and if the mdconfig(8) reports another number than 0, use that. Beware the /dev/daX number of your USB stick.
If you don't want to browse the contents of the image, ovbiously you can omit the mdconfig(8) and use the image file in the dd if=file instead of /dev/md0
You may want to add status=progress to the dd(1) command, or use sysutils/pv (install it 1st) like this: pv -tepb /dev/md0|dd of=/dev/da0 bs=64k conv=sync

$ su -
# pkg install geteltorito && exit
$ cd ~/Downloads
$ geteltorito -o jbuj73wd.img jbuj73wd.iso
$ su -
# mdconfig jbuj73wd.img
# dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/da0 bs=64k conv=sync
# mdconfig -du 0

The prepared USB media should boot and install the UEFI/BIOS update.
If you encounter a message like "Press CTRL+P to enter the management console" and you don't have a password for that, well that's another story. Welcome in the brave new world o_O. If an empty password works, this means
  1. you're in urgent need for an update
  2. You should immediately set it to a reasonable value according to your security demands
    (at least 6-8 chars, mixed letters/numbers, mixed non-/capitalized etc. pp.)
And if your machine is non-Intel, these OOB just have different names, search yourself.
Good luck!
 
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