I just gave Dell's utility a try, and it worked perfectly to make a bootable image to flash the BIOS. However, their software is targeted to Fedora, so it needs some little tweaks.
I have a Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop running Ubuntu Feisty.
I had tried before to run the .exe file under M$*******, but since my battery is dead it didn't let me go through. So this is what I did under Ubuntu. Again, try it at your own risk...
1) I went to
ftp://ftp.dell.com/bios and downloaded the updates I needed (I was 6 versions behind!!!). In my case, they are executables files with name ME051xyy.EXE where xyy is the version number.
2) I downloaded the biosdisk-<version>.tar.gz tarball from
http://linux.dell.com/biosdisk/
3) biosdisk needs dos2unix and some other stuff. Everything should be ok doing
Code:
sudo apt-get install sysutils syslinux
4) I unpacked and installed biosdisk with (in the directory where the tarball is)
Code:
tar -xzvf biosdisk-<version>.tar.gz
cd biosdisk-<version>
sudo sh install.sh
which should install the script /usr/sbin/biosdisk
5) since the installed script is a sh script, under Ubuntu (and under any Debian based distro I think) this must be modified into a bash script because of some shell conflict. Therefore, do
Code:
sudo gedit /usr/sbin/biosdisk
edit the first line #!/bin/sh into #!/bin/bash, save and exit.
6) Install the FILE.EXE executable Bios update file downloaded from Dell with
Code:
cd <the directory where FILE.EXE is>
sudo biosdisk install FILE.EXE
this produces a /tmp/FILE.img image file and then exits, complaining that the automated procedure only works under Fedora. The file must then be manually copied with
Code:
sudo mv /tmp/FILE.img /boot/
7) modify grub's boot menu with
Code:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
adding the following lines at the end:
Code:
title BIOS Flash FILE
kernel /memdisk
initrd /FILE.img
Then reboot and select the new entry in the boot menu. This should launch the DOS utility to flash the BIOS. If everything goes well, it should check if the system is OK, ask if you want to update the BIOS, update it and automatically reboot.
I hope this helps!
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