ThinkPad X61 BIOS upgrade

B

balanga

I just tried updating the BIOS on a ThinkPad X61, but it didn't work. The BIOS updates all seem to involve applying them from Windows, although after digging around I came across:-

BIOS Upgrade - ThinkWiki

www.thinkwiki.org www.thinkwiki.org

which suggests that BIOS updates can be applied after booting DOS or creating a bootable USB stick. Should I expect to be able to create such a USB stick using FreeBSD?
 
balanga said:
A bootable ISO image can be found here:-


The contents can be extracted using tar xf 7nuj22uc.iso and contains a copy of DOS.
Click to expand...

Be 100% sure you have the latest correct X61 image.

balanga said:
Can I simply dd() this file to a USB stick?
Click to expand...

Unless Lenevo say it's an hybrid image (like recent FreeBSD version .ISO files) then almost certainly not.

I had the same issue for an X200, so copied the .ISO to a Ventoy USB installer:

https://www.ventoy.net/

then booted that USB, chose the right .ISO from the menu, which Ventoy then (edit: installed booted into Lenovo's DOS BIOS installer.)

You need to download and run either the Windows or Linux version of the Ventoy USB installer. You may then choose to use Ventoy's default ExFAT filesystem, or another like FAT32, to copy your various install ISOs to.

Take a while to browse the excellent online documents.

Further edit: I thought this was familiar ... balanga, didn't we work through this in lots of detail back in April?

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/...iple-bootable-images-to-same-usb-stick.88688/
 
balanga said:
I do have a multiboot Ventoy disk, and am very pleased with, but didn't think of using it to launch this ISO. Can't think why..but will definitely give it a try and see what happens. Thanks for the suggestion.
Click to expand...
I'm trying to boot 7nuj22uc.iso which resides on the partition of my Ventoy disk.

When selecting it, I get three mode options: normal, grub2, memdisk.

grub2 returns me to the previous menu.

normal mode brings up a PXE boot screen.

memdisk boots up to an IBM DOS version 5.00 A> prompt
but errors are displayed because no CD-ROM drive is found and no bios upgrade file are available.
 
That is expected since that you need a specific driver for ventoy filesystem, I doubt that there is one for DOS.
 
Apparently you can easily apply a BIOS update from Linux:-


I tried this but on booting I get

Non-system disk or disk error
Replace and press any key when ready
Click to expand...

The DOS boot files are copied onto USB but it fails to boot.

Incidentally, the geteltorito program mentioned is available on FreeBSD.

The img created is for a 1.44 floppy so I have no idea how it is supposed to work. The guide makes out that it is fairly straightforward to do so I must be missing something.
 
Check this as it might be better BIOS than yours :)
From the link:
Code: 
Installation

The flasher is an EXE-file which updates the BIOS directly. Note that the BIOS flasher only works on 32-bit versions of Windows. If you use a 64-bit version or another operating system you have to burn the included ISO-file on a CD or DVD and boot from it. The following table shows the supported Thinkpad-models and the corresponding BIOS-update-files:
 
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