How to Update Your Thinkpad's Bios With Linux or OpenBSD

  • Wed, Sep 12, 2018
  • 2-minute read
!
Warning: This post is over 365 days old. The information may be out of date.

Small howto to explain how to update your bios with Linux or OpenBSD.


## Get your new bios At first, go to the Lenovo website and download your new bios:
  • Go to lenovo support
  • Use the search bar to find your product (example for me, x270)
  • Choose the right product (if necessary) and click search
  • On the right side, click on Update Your System
  • Click on BIOS/UEFI
  • Choose *BIOS Update (Bootable CD) for Windows *
  • Download

For me the file is called like this : r0iuj25wd.iso


## Extract bios update Now you will need to install *geteltorito*.

  • With OpenBSD:

    $ doas pkg_add geteltorito

quirks-3.7 signed on 2018-09-09T13:15:19Z geteltorito-0.6: ok ```

  • With Debian:

    $ sudo apt-get install genisoimage

Now we will extract the bios update :

$ geteltorito -o bios_update.img r0iuj25wd.iso
Booting catalog starts at sector: 20 
Manufacturer of CD: NERO BURNING ROM VER 12
Image architecture: x86
Boot media type is: harddisk
El Torito image starts at sector 27 and has 43008 sector(s) of 512 Bytes

Image has been written to file "bios_update.img".

This will create a file called bios_update.img.


## Put the image on an USB key **CAREFULL** : on my computer, my USB key is sda1 on Linux and sd1 on OpenBSD.

Please check twice on your computer the name of your USB key.

  • With OpenBSD :

    $ doas dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/rsd1c

  • With Linux :

    $ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda

Now all you need is to reboot, to boot on your USB key and follow the instructions.

Enjoy 😉

OpenBSDLinux bios