Create a bootable USB pendrive to upgrade Lenovo ThinkPad W530 BIOS

Posted on One min read

Recently I had to update the bios of my laptop from a USB pendrive, because I had no CD/DVD drive around. Cameron Seader’s post Lenovo BIOS Update method for Linux and USB thumb drive came very handy, but used an obsolete tool so I updated his instructions a bit to make them work.

1. Get the machine type and model of your laptop

In order to grab this information you can either go to the BIOS or use dmidecode or hwinfo. In my case it was ThinkPad W530 2438-2KU.

2. Download bios update ISO from Lenovo’s site

I got mine: “g5uj22us.iso” from Lenovo’s support page

3. Extract the boot image from the iso

To do it you can use genisoimage, which can be installed using regular.

sudo apt-get install genisoimage

PS. you can also download it from: Ubuntu man pages

Once you have this tool installed, extract boot image from ISO with:

geteltorito g5uj22us.iso > biosupdate.img

4. Copy the boot image to the USB pendrive 

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

Reboot and boot from USB to run the Flash Utility Cheers,
Señor QA