Flashing the Bios in MacOSx

[legendaryv]

Anyone have an idea on how to update the Bios without having Windows installed?

[farnsworth]

you could try using crossover
http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/
download the trial and see if it works.

[haraldrt]

crossover will not work! it is an API not an emulator ( in fact it is a modified wine version ), You don't have lowlevel access to your hardware, wich is essential to flashing the bios.
I think using a Windows Preinstallion Environment (PE) like Bart PE could work, these could be written to an USB Stick, and you could boot an modified XP from that Stick. 2GB or 4GB Sticks are inexpensive and are quite big enough. Of course you need someone with a working xp or a prebuild image to make a bootable Stick.

[phaseIV]

I'd go for Hiren's BootCD (on USB stick) since it can start up a stripped down Win XP environment.
Haven't tried this myself but you should be able to add the bios/flash files to the stick, boot and execute
the flash software from it.

edit: pls read Hagar's reply below. this method is not recommended.

[jimjar]

Been there, done that

I upgraded to the S10e 14cn66ww level in April. I based this thanks to instructions from muelra who used this for his S10 Ubuntu installation.

I needed a USB floppy-disk drive and two floppies. I also used a Suse Linux system I have on my S10 to prep the disks, but I think that you can avoid this.

One of the floppies needs to be bootable, preferably with Caldera Dr DOS. I think you can find and download a copy, I ended up using an old boot floppy that I had created years ago from partition magic Version 8. At first I tried creating a new boot floppy under Windows, this didn't work with the Bios program because Windows included a high memory management program (Himem). The S10 bios program detected this and hated it! It gave me an error message as well as setting off an alarm as loud as a smoke alarm.

I downloaded the "14cn66ww.exe" (bios) file from Lenovo, copied it to my Linux system and used the cabextract program in the terminal to extract the contents. If you google it you can find a Mac OSX version of cabextract, but I didn't try this. After extracting, I copied the files "phlash16.exe" and "bios.wph" onto a second floppy. I tried to use the same boot floppy but there was not quite enough space available.

Put the DOS boot floppy in the drive, and restart the S10. Press F12 (FN + F11) and boot from Floppy Drive . After boot you can see the "A:>" prompt. Remove the boot floppy, insert the second floppy, and type in: "phlash16.exe /C /S /Force bios.wph"

After finished you can hear a load BEEP and the S10 restarts. Press F2 for entering the bios and load the "system defaults", save that with "F10".

[Hagar]

justa quick note that may or may not be relevant, but I bricked an intel motherboard attempting to flash the bios booted from hiren's - hence wouldn't recommend using that.

[phaseIV]

justa quick note that may or may not be relevant, but I bricked an intel motherboard attempting to flash the bios booted from hiren's - hence wouldn't recommend using that.

Ugh. Okay forget I suggested Hiren's as a option.

[IvanX]

I successfully flashed my S10 BIOS using BartPE and a USB stick. Of course, you need to use Windows XP on another machine to use the tools, but FWIW I did it all in VMWare Fusion 2.0.4 running on another Mac. You could probably even do the same on the S10 itself, if you have enough RAM...

Here's how to do it, or at least, this is what worked for me:

Get BartPE (aka PEBuilder) 3.1.1.10a, here: http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/#download
Get PE2USB 3.0.0.7, here: http://gocoding.com/page.php?al=petousb

Run pebuilder.exe, and set it up as follows:
Source: the drive letter of the XP installation CD, or the root of your Lenovo XP volume)
Custom: leave blank
Output: BartPE (the default)

Now it's time for for PE2USB. Set it up as follows:
USB Removable
Select your USB stick drive
check Enable Disk Format, with Quick Format, and no other checkboxes
Source path: browse to the "BartPE" folder inside the pebuilder3110a folder
check Enable File Copy, and Overwrite Always

Go ahead and start. If your USB stick is 2 GB or smaller, it should proceed, and when done, you should have a stick you can boot your S10 with. At least, that's what's supposed to happen.

If your USB stick is >2 GB (or maybe 4 GB), as mine was, this process will fail, but you still need to do it because PE2USB will repartition the card in some magic way. (At least, when I partitioned the card elsewhere, it wouldn't work.) You then need to go to Explorer and find the drive, right-click on it and choose Format; then choose NTFS for the format. Then come back to PE2USB, and this time, uncheck Enable Disk Format, but otherwise repeat the steps above.

Now that you've got your bootable stick, download the new BIOS, and uncompress it. It's a self-extracting archive. Rename the resulting folder "S10BIOS". Put it on the root of your stick.

You should then be able to start up the S10 from the stick; if not, try the boot menu (F12 during startup). BartPE will start to load. Answer No to the question about setting up networking. Then go to the Go menu, choose Run, and type X:\S10BIOS\WinPhlash.exe and press return. Flash away.

Some comments:
- It appears that for a USB disk to boot, it needs to be partitioned by PE2USB, and it needs to be either FAT(16) or NTFS. FAT32 doesn't work; I tried. FAT isn't an option for larger drives, hence the NTFS formatting instruction above. Because I didn't actually have any smaller USB sticks, I can't actually vouch for whether FAT formatting works. However, I'd have to believe it does, since that's what the PE2USB is designed to create.

- An actual USB stick might to be your best bet. At any rate, I tried using a couple of different multi-card readers with flash cards, and the S10 just wouldn't start from them. Only my USB stick worked.

- I tried using the internal SD card slot as a startup disk, but the S10 won't recognize it as such.

[step2006]

I wonder if it is possible to use UBCD for Windows to flash the BIOS ?

Edit: never mind, I just found an empty 2 Gb USB stick and updated the BIOS with BartPE

[vaniii]

Isn't this a bit overkill, shouldn't FreeDOS do? Well under 10 MB...