14 Jan 2015

Dell BIOS upgrade without Windows

I wanted to upgrade the BIOS in my laptop, but it’s a little tricky using only free and open source softwares. This guide describes how to upgrade a BIOS of a Dell 7537 Laptop, without Windows.

We need the following things to proceed:

• a BIOS installer[1],
• a FreeDOS image[2],
• a pendrive,
• a Linux OS,
• a suitable laptop.

After we downloaded the installer and the image, we have to create a bootable FreeDOS live USB stick. I had a 1GB pendrive, so I used the 2-256 image.

First of all, we have to extract the image file:

bunzip2 FreeDOS-1.1-memstick-2-256M.img.bz2

My USB stick’s name was /dev/sdb. You can get this information from dmesg, after you plugged in or removed the stick.

The next step is to write the image byte by byte to the pendrice with dd:

sudo dd if=FreeDOS-1.1-memstick-2-256M.img of=/dev/sdb bs=512
[sudo] password for tibi: 
488282+0 records in
488282+0 records out
250000384 bytes (250 MB) copied, 71,8346 s, 3,5 MB/s

We can ensure the stick’s consistency with the sync command. That will flush every pending write to the disks.

Now, we have to copy the downloaded BIOS installer to the USB stick. Mount the pendrive, then copy the exe file into the root directory of the pendrive.

We are in the finish:

1. boot your laptop,
2. choose the pendrive as the BOOT media,
3. type fdos when the SysLinux asks for what to boot,
4. run the installer: 7537A12.exe.

It will take some time (~5 minutes) to extract all the things and flash your BIOS.

• [1]
• [2]

Till next time,
Tibor Benke at 00:00