How to Update ThinkPad T460's BIOS on any Linux OS

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I contacted with Lenovo support over Twitter, and they told me that there is no way to update ThinkPad T460’s BIOS. So, here is a guide that you can update the BIOS — but with a disclaimer; please make sure that you know what you are doing because you can do something wrong. Also, I use Ubuntu 18.04, and the BIOS version was 1.10 which was released March 23, 2016.

Required tools and steps to apply the update

I got an USB driver, and wiped it to make it ready the drive. At the same time, I downloaded the update, BIOS, from ThinkPad’s support. Also, wanted to read the README.txt because they can add important information for the hardware owners.

Next step is that downloading some utilities to work with that r06uj66d.iso since we won’t able to flash that ISO into the USB drive.

Psst. I think you don’t run Ubuntu. That’s why you consider some other options to use that tool. Here is the source code

sudo apt install -y genisoimage

As a sysadmin advice, keep the ISO image on your archive. You may need it for latter. Trust me.

Convert the ISO (CD image) to IMG (aka. floppy disk format)

geteltorito -o bios.img r06uj66d.iso

Flash the USB. If you don’t know how to find your USB’s device path, please search it.

sudo dd if=bios.img of=/dev/sdb

We have few steps left like applying the update. Don’t unplug the USB, and safely reboot the system. When you see the vendor logo, press F12 then choose the USB driver to boot.

Now, you can see some weird things in the screen. No need to be worried. It’ll be so easy, and it takes only less than 10 minutes; therefore, please follow each instructions.

When pops up the BIOS update, go “system update”, and like we said earlier, follow each instructions. The system reboots itself few times.

The result

So, I updated the BIOS of ThinkPad T460 from 1.10 to 1.40.

Thanks

I need to thank for this two awesome articles!