[SUPPORT REQUEST] X220 BIOS UPDATE INSTRUCTIONS - USB

[gbear14275]

Lenovo or community,

I am having one heck of a time getting my BIOS updated without having an external cd rom drive or windows.

Could someone please post a howto for updating the x220's BIOS using a USB thumbdrive?  And yes I've googled and tried a lot of different guides.  Hoping someone out there can point me to one that worked for them.  

Very Respectfully,

Garrett

[gbear14275]

Lenovo,

Does it really take you more than 10 days to respond?  Is this representative of your customer service mentality?

P.S.  I noticed someone "fixed" my location... so I changed it back again.

[fiesh]

I would appreciate that too.  Alas booting the disk image via grub + memdisk does not seem to work.  And furthermore mounting the disk image just results in an empty filesystem.  So I am out of luck.

[zoltanthegypsy]

@gbear14275,

I wouldn't expect Lenovo to respond here at all.  This is a peer-to-peer forum.  Occasionally a Lenovo employee stops by.

As to your "fixed" location: the TOS requires a country.  Lots of folks ignore that, but it is occasionally helpful when posting a suggestion/solution.  Suit yourself.

@fiesh,

How are you booting the ISO via flash?  Are you using the "raw" option?  It's sometimes necessary.  I'm not saying that it will work, or that if it does boot, it won't brick your machine.  Also use the _latest_ memdisk you can find. I haven't tried BIOS flash frrom flash media.  I _do_ boot some CD ISOs thusly (Windows recovery CD as an example);

    title Windows 7 Recovery 64 bit
        kernel /boot/isolinux/memdisk iso raw
        initrd /ISOs/Windows_7_64-bit_Repair_Disc.iso

Easier to borrow a USB Optical drive...

Z.

[fiesh]

OK, sorry, to clarify that -- booting the image works, with or without raw.  But then when I select menu entry 2 or 3 (1 being "Read me first"), it just hangs.  If I had an optical drive, I would use it, but who needs optical drives these days... if Lenovo provided a bootable USB image, that would also be perfectly fine.

[Shino · Accepted solution]

I know I'm a bit late, but here's how I managed to flash my bios (X220) using a USB flash drive:

1. Get the bios update iso (8duj10uc.iso here) from the lenovo support site.

2. Get 'geteltorito' and extract the boot image from the iso (isobar.c probably works too)

$ wget 'http://www.uni-koblenz.de/~krienke/ftp/noarch/geteltorito/geteltorito.pl'

$ perl geteltorito.pl 8duj10uc.iso > biosupdate.img

3. Copy the image to the usb thumdrive

$ sudo dd if=biosupdate.img of=/dev/usbthumdrive bs=512K

Reboot, Press F12 and boot from thumb drive.

[fiesh]

Thank you, Shino!  I had no idea about this wonderful perl script.  Everything worked like a charm!

[twotoneblue]

This worked for me as well on an X220 4290-W4H using an 8 GB Corsair Flash Voyager on a freshly installed Ubuntu 11.04...

The grub2-method described in the ThinkWiki did not work for me.

Thanks a lot