My company notebook (A Lenovo ThinkPad L470) sometimes crashed when I put it into the docking station: It turn back on, the external monitor turns on, but after that I only see a black screen with the mouse cursor. Today I had enough and performed the pending firmware update, which also includes the Intel CPU microcode updates.

As a Linux only user performing the firmware update is still fun, as Lenovo provides only a Windows tool or as an alternative a bootable CD. There also is the Linux Vendor Firmware Service which nowadays simplified the process and Levono also contributes to it, but not for my model.

wget https://download.lenovo.com/pccbbs/mobiles/r0guj17wd.iso

That gets me the file r0guj17wd.iso.

Getting a USB-DVD drive and burning the image to a DVD media I somehow consider wasteful, so I tried to put the image on a spare USB stick (here /dev/dec):

sudo dd bs=1M if=r0guj17wd.iso of=/dev/sdc

But the Notebook refused to boot from it.

Next I had a look at it using isoinfo -d r0guj17wd.iso which showed the DVD to be empty but only contain an El Torito boot image. So I extracted the boot image into file:

geteltorito -o ./leno.boot r0guj17wd.iso

Using file on it shows it to be a partitioned disk image with only one partition, so I mounted that:

sudo losetup -P /dev/loop0 ./leno.boot
sudo mount -o ro /dev/loop0p1 /mnt

Finally I was able to access the files and copied it onto my Debian 9 Stretch systems EFI partition:

sudo install -D /mnt/FLASH/NoDCCheck_bootx64.efi /boot/efi/FLASH/NoDCCheck_bootx64.efi
sudo install -D /mnt/FLASH/ShellFlash.efi /boot/efi/FLASH/ShellFlash.efi
sudo install -D /mnt/FLASH/R0GET66W/\$0AR0G00.FL1 /boot/efi/FLASH/R0GET66W/\$0AR0G00.FL1
sudo install -D /mnt/EFI/Boot/Bootx64.efi /boot/efi/EFI/lenovo/bootx64.efi

Next I told the firmware to boot into the firmware update tool once:

sudo efibootmgr --create-only --disk /dev/sda --part 1 --label "FWUpdate" --loader '\EFI\lenovo\bootx64.efi'
sudo efibootmgr --bootnext 0001  # or whatever gets created by the line above
sudo efibootmgr --verbose

And finally the reboot:

sudo reboot

The gets you into the firmware update tool: It only sets up the notebook to perform the firmware update on the next reboot, so you have to reboot again once more.

That all went fine so now I’m at version 1.66.

After the update you can remove the files amd the boot entry:

sudo efibootmgr -B -b 0001
sudo rm -rf /boot/efi/FLASH /boot/efi/EFI/lenovo