2018-05-19 • LINUX

Lenovo BIOS/UEFI update via USB from Linux

I’m on a Lenovo T460s running fedora 27. One day, I ran into an issue with my video setup. It occurred to me that I had not updated my bios in a while, and since the whole Meltdown/Spectre thing came up, I should probably check on this. Yes, sure enough, I was on patch 1.20, the latest was 1.34, and the fix for Meltdown/Spectre was in 1.31. Good thing no one cares about my machine but me.

Find your system’s bios update from Lenovo, via Bootable CD. Mine, a T460s, was here:
- https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/ds112118
Check out this guys’s great post. You would think you could just copy the .iso to your USB device with dd, but no you cannot. It’s a CD format .iso and you have to pull out the CD formatting with this nice utility called geteltorito.
- https://workaround.org/article/updating-the-bios-on-lenovo-laptops-from-linux-using-a-USB-flash-stick/
  # wget https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles/n1cur21w.iso # dnf install geteltorito # geteltorito -o bios.img n1cur21w.iso

Make sure you identify the correct block device of your USB drive or you will probably have lots of other problems. This command might be helpful.

# dmesg | grep sd

My block device for my USB stick is /dev/sdb. So here is the dd command to copy the image to the USB:

# dd if=bios.img of=/dev/sdb