Posting

« Experts Exchange Google Account as OpenID »

Windows-only bios updaters and me

Home | Posted on Saturday 15 May 2010 at 14:10

So I have this nice shiny light laptop (the Samsung X360). It came with Microsoft Vista pre-installed, but I never even booted it; I wiped it and installed Ubuntu on it immediately. It's working quite fine, except for some minor issues with its screen's backlight being a bit quirky (it needs a i915.modeset=0 part behind its kernel line in Grub's config).

Of course its manufacturer -- Samsung -- puts out bios updates (thankfully). It seems these could remedy these issues. However, instead of having some DOS-like application which can be run in FreeDOS or something, this is a Windows application which refuses to run under wine (bad idea anyway) and specifically checks whether it is being run on the specific laptop (so I can't extract things from it).

Problem is, Windows has been wiped clean from the machine and I have no intention to put the harddisk through a series of resizing tricks to install it again. I don't even have an install disk from the version it shipped with (a trend I quite hate, despite the laptop not even having an optical drive).

So, dear lazyweb, anyone having an idea how to flash the latest bios on it anyway? A BartPE livecd could be an idea, but I don't have WindowsXP handy...

Comments

1. Posted at 2010-05-15 16:09:33 by Osi [ Permalink ]

What might be an option is to grab a harddisk with Windows from another computer and boot it from usb. Or maybe vmware does the trick?

2. Posted at 2010-05-24 17:30:41 by Annelies [ Permalink ]

I did something with an usb-bootable, dunno if that works under ubuntu, trick is you still have to make your usb-stick bootable...didnÂ´t google provide any information on this?

3. Posted at 2010-05-24 17:41:26 by Annelies [ Permalink ]

Wat jij moet hebben is http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net/ en dan de FreeDOS utility laden, waarmee je je bootable usb-stick met BIOS install kunt laden. Dus. Dan heb je gewoon een virtuele DOS en kun je gewoon je BIOS-meuk uitpakken en installen. Nice eh?!

4. Posted at 2010-05-24 17:54:54 by Michiel [ Permalink ]

Annelies: except for the part where the flasher app does not work under DOS (see second paragraph).

Unetbootin is a default part of my toolkit for years now, really recommended for making bootable usbsticks out of almost everything.

5. Posted at 2010-05-24 18:01:07 by Annelies [ Permalink ]

Can't you make it work under DOS? i.e. convert it or something? If it's a Windows app, it should be possible to convert it.

6. Posted at 2010-05-24 20:44:47 by Michiel Scholten [ Permalink ]

Erm no, you can't just "convert a windows app into a DOS app" and besides, it has all kinds of checks whether it's running in the right environment...

You should go read up on win32 apps and how those are tied to all kinds of libraries and such BTW, it's quite interesting to know how platforms work :)

The only way would be to make some kind of windows livecd (like the BartPE thing I talked about), but that takes a Windows XP installation and such. Oh well, I'll figure something out.

Add comment

You need to provide a valid e-mail address to comment here, but it will not be displayed on this website. HTML will be escaped, so you won't be able to add links. Post the URL instead. Line breaks will be converted to breaks.

Posting

Windows-only bios updaters and me

Comments

Add comment

Name

E-mail address

WWW

Are you a spammer (yes/no)?