R5(x)/T4(x) Series (BIOS)/EC Flashing Workaround

[JGTC.co.jp]

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Hello Everyone!

Now, I'd like to share with you a workaround I performed for updating the EC on my 1860-A73 machine, without using a Floppy Drive and without starting the process from within Windows (because right now I have Arch Linux installed).

So, Here it goes:

1) Download the approproate flashing image (Windows) for your machine.
2) Prepare a USB driverless DOS bootdisk.
My suggestions:
-For Windows users, try some of the driverless boot disks around in the wild with HP USB Flash tool.
-Use Rufus (Recommended), as it allows you to put some custom images (Only tried with the FreeDOS default, probably works with the IBM SPSD one as well).
-For Linux users ther are a few raw images out there as well. Pick the one you like the most, use dd to write it to your pendrive and off you go.
3) Extract the BIOS/EC Flashing files form the downloaded archive, especially those ones under the .IMG floppy disk image.
4) Place the extracted .IMG image files on a folder in the USB filesystem.
5) Boot your ThinkPad from USB, wait for DOS to load...
6) Navigate to your flashing files folder, and execute UPDTFLSH.EXE. It will only show the flashing dialog, the squared one when you confirm the flashing into the SPSD framing.
7) Wait for the process to finish and power on again. You should be able to see your updataed BIOS/EC version number on the main BIOS Screen.

A few poniters/suggestions:
-Only tried with a full IBM EC DOS SPSD image on a R52 series laptop, which limits its scope to laptops with an IBM SPSD BIOS/EC Files available.
-Booted from USB (native BIOS support), but I think it could also be achieved by burning those .IMG files onto a CD.
-Pending a BIOS test, as I updated that before, starting the process from within Windows, but it should work as well.

Questions and further suggestions are welcome. Hope this helps.