Update your Thinkpad’s bios with Linux or OpenBSD

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 😉