how do I upgrade my Acer Aspire5610Z bios on linux?
 

Hi;]

from some time i have been trying to find some way for upgrading BIOS on my acer aspire 5610z laptop, there are some materials that i have found on the internet telling that i should run the upgrade from freedos level by running the .bat file. My problem is however that i cannot find any other bios update package for my laptop than .exe file which can not be run from freedos. Is there any possibility to make it work somehow? anyone had successfully done bios upgrade on 5610Z?


cheers,
blorpton

RE: how do I upgrade my Acer Aspire5610Z bios on linux?
 

The .exe

That .exe file is probably a container file for the BIOS and the files that are needed to flash it. You will need a Windows machine to execute it and retrieve its contents.

As an example, the BIOS download for my Gigabyte motherboard is an .exe and unpacks to a .bat file, a flashing utility and the BIOS file.

Search the Acer support site and the internet thoroughly for more information on the exact method of flashing the BIOS on your system. Making a mistake with flashing can cost you your Aspire.

If Acer only refers to flashing running a Windows OS, do not assume that you can use DOS/FreeDOS to flash. Good Luck

thanx for a quick replays guys;] how do I unpack .exe file? I mean i was trying to use cabextract for this purpose with no luck some time ago. I really would like to avoid putting this bad ass m$ excrement on my box just to flash BIOS. There has to be some other way;] and about the acer support, it only gives me this exe file, had no luck trying to find appropriate .bat files on their resources.


cheers

It is a Windows file...

All you have to do is download the .exe file to a USB flash partitioned for Windows, then beg, borrow or steal access to a system running Windows and double-click on the .exe file. There on the USB flash you will then have the files you need.

I'm wrong...

It appears that you do need to run the flash32.exe file on your 5610Z while running Windows. At least that is how I would interpret the readme.txt included in the BIOS .zip file.

However, you might try to run the flash32.exe on a windows system to see what it contains. Google has posts about using FreeDOS with the contents of the an .exe file, The question is whether it is a possibility in this case.

http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/...ating_the_BIOS

i have downloaded bios version for 5610 which appears to be the same version as for 5610Z model(just guessing;)), and then followed the instructions. the strange thing is that after installing freedos on memory stick and copying required bios files on it and then booting from it does not give required result. after booting from usb flash drive and choosing the only 'default' boot option from the freedos, all the process hangs on some error and does not want to continue. i mean, what is the crack?;]


cheers