blog/data/2022-04-20-geteltorito-firmware-upgrade.txt

   1 Title: geteltorito make CD firmware upgrades a breeze
   2 Tags: english, debian
   3 Date: 2022-04-20 11:50
   4
   5 <p>Recently I wanted to upgrade the firmware of my thinkpad, and
   6 located the firmware download page from Lenovo (which annoyingly do
   7 not allow access via Tor, forcing me to hand them more personal
   8 information that I would like).  The
   9 <a href="https://support.lenovo.com/no/en/search?query=thinkpad firmware bios upgrade iso&SearchType=Customer search&searchLocation=Masthead">download
  10 from Lenovo</a> is a bootable ISO image, which is a bit of a problem
  11 when all I got available is a USB memory stick.  I tried booting the
  12 ISO as a USB stick, but this did not work.  But genisoimage came to
  13 the rescue.</p>
  14
  15 <P>The geteltorito program in
  16 <a href="http://tracker.debian.org/cdrkit">the genisoimage binary
  17 package</a> is able to convert the bootable ISO image to a bootable
  18 USB stick using a simple command line recipe, which I then can write
  19 to the most recently inserted USB stick:</p>
  20
  21 <blockquote><pre>
  22 geteltorito -o usbstick.img lenovo-firmware.iso
  23 sudo dd bs=10M if=usbstick.img of=$(ls -tr /dev/sd?|tail -1)
  24 </pre></blockquote>
  25
  26 <p>This USB stick booted the firmware upgrader just fine, and in a few
  27 minutes my machine had the latest and greatest BIOS firmware in place.</p>