Arch Linux

Gullible Jones

Member

Registered: 2004-12-29

Posts: 4,863

Updating a Thinkpad 600E's BIOS. Any way to get the firmware file?

Hope this is the right forum, it does involve hardware...

Anyway. I have a Thinkpad 600E with BIOS revision 1.05. It works pretty well with various distros, including Arch; but BIOS revision 1.05 has a nasty bug that makes ACPI not work at all (you can't even force it on). I was hoping to correct that with a BIOS update.

Unfortunately, Lenovo has other plans. I was able to get disk creator program from here:
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa … SHY-43DNQ5

but it doesn't run under WIne. Or Windows 7. Or decompress with any archive extractor I know of. Googling around indicates that I'm supposed to set up a fake floppy drive in a a Win2k VM, or something like that. I'd like to know of there are any alternatives before dragging out Win2k. So...

1. Has anyone figured out a better way to extract the EXE since ThinkWiki was last updated?

2. Failing that, can I get the actual firmware file from Lenovo, or from anyone else who is legally capable of providing it? I tried looking in Lenovo's "BIOS Download Matrix," but that doesn't seem to exist any more.

Edit: N/M. Wound up using a real Win2k install with a real floppy drive. BTW, a note for anyone else with a 600E... The BIOS update disk creator will throw an error if you run it from a directory with a space in its name. Run it from C:\ and it should work.

Last edited by Gullible Jones (2012-09-09 01:16:42)