Updating My ThinkPad BIOS from Linux

Fri, 03 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

About a year ago, I got a ThinkPad E14 Gen 2 (Ryzen) and wanted to update its BIOS.

However, I didn’t want to install Windows just to update the BIOS. After some research online, I discovered that Lenovo releases BIOS updates for ThinkPad in two formats - one is through the Bios Update Utility (Windows), which is a .exe file, and the other is a .iso file that can be flashed through a USB thumb drive.

Here’s how to update the BIOS under Linux:

Get the latest version of the BIOS in .iso format for your model from the Lenovo support site.
Download geteltorito, a Perl script that extracts the boot image from the bios.iso file. You can grab it from here.
Extract the boot image from the bios.iso file (in my case, the file was r1auj38wd.iso) using the command $ geteltorito.pl -o bios_update.img r1auj38wd.iso.
Copy the image to USB using the dd command: $ sudo dd if=bios_update.img of=/dev/sda. Note that you should replace /dev/sda with the corresponding device name for your system.
Boot from your USB drive, follow the instructions, and update the BIOS.

At first, I was nervous about what would happen if anything went wrong, but everything worked out just fine :)

E14 on Prateek Punetha

Updating My ThinkPad BIOS from Linux