Over the last weekend i was trying to update bios of IBM Thinkpad R52 (that originally has Windows XP license which I erased and installed Mandriva 2010 :-)
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/BIOS_Upgrade was very helpful in understanding this difficult issue. The only way for me now to update bios was take help of GRUB :-) Which turned out to be a great educational exercise on grub for me as I was completely oblivious to it and it's issues... till now. (Luckily :-) I had EXT4 on that laptop which made my life even more fun... After spending about a day I could manage to load & run the .IMG file of new bios but despite that could not update the bios. With a tonnes of worries and a pinch of salt I had to switch off (a well advised NO NO) the PC since no activity happened for 15 minutes even after navigating inside the bios update program and hitting the final <ENTER> & <DO NOT SWITCH OFF> button. Beware, those who have dealt with bios update may have horror stories to tell! however from the same piece of software I could later try the third option. { Option 1. Read the documetation Option 2. Update BIOS Option 3. Update model no. etc. } upon executing it the machine would promptly switch off correctly. To make the long story short has anybody recently or in the past updated the IBM R52 bios this way under Linux... Because else I am left with no option but to reload windows on it just to upgrade bios... :-( The Silver lining is Mandriva 2010 Grub as boot loader worked well with EXT4 against some reported issues elsewhere with other distros. Any suggestions are welcome on subject of updating IBM bios using GRUB. The similar documentation of using LILO for the same purpose would add more meat to the Linux Documentation Project :-) -- The bottomine: Machine still boot and runs Mandriva 2010, though the same behaviour is not guaranteed anywhere _______________________________________ Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
