Frankly in my opinion, bios should only be updatable from the bios itself. No matter which os we talk about, it can always get in the way.
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Thank you sane person.
Acer supports 2 of their devices on Linux
Thank you. Sadly mine is different.
I know for HP machines, the bios updater exe can be decompressed and you can just get the bios image and the signature file from that.
Idk what machine you have, but at least for an older aspire laptop my friend has, there is a bios download.
If you follow instructions to make bios recovery media, you can update your bios through that.
Edit: that Acer laptop you have doesn't even show up on Acer's support page. Supposedly it's sold as an Acer aspire a something or other. If you search based on your snid, you should be able to get to a downloads page.
Also clevo seems to make this laptop, according to the Acer India webpage I found for it
doesn't even show up on Acer's support page.
This is exactly my problem.
If you search based on your snid, you should be able to get to a downloads page.
Still nothing.
Thank You.
What's your snid? It might show up as a different model on a different website.
Install windows on a second/spare drive. Boot PC from this and run their tool.
I know you're trying to find a way around not using windows, but if the vendors only solution involves it, I wouldn't trust any hacky workarounds when it comes to bios updates.
Thank you. Makes sense.
if the provide and exe, You can always create a bootable usb stick of freedos or another dos tool. Copy the file onto the stick. boot to it and cd to where the file is and issue filename.exe
And this is one more reason I will only buy a laptop from System76, Framework, or Tuxedo to run Linux.
All motherboard manufacturers irrespective of OEM should provider a firmware mode that can be boot to, allowing BIOS upgrades. But since they don’t seem to, especially with laptops, seems best to stick with known vendors whose primary OS they support is Linux.
Good luck, OP. Hope the live Windows USB thing works. Just be careful to not get infected with Recall or any other Microsoft nonsense :)
Razer was the worst. It had to be done thru a ‘legitimate’ copy of the latest full Microsoft Windows (no old Windows, Windows PE, FreeDOS, etc.) & the purpose was to give you a black+green GUI experience. After I emailed them about this several years ago when I had a Razer laptop, they put up a sign on the support page now saying installing Linux voids both you warranty & any support tickets.
Yeah, I’ve also found Razer to be quite bad both in quality of hardware and support.
Only thing I own now that is made by Razer is a mouse.
Funny is that they did a big push for a hot minute to be the next developer-friendly laptop goto as they had a lot of power & æsthetics that were slim & looked alright in an office compared to everything else at the time where gaming laptops needed RGB & a hood scoop while non-gaming laptop suffered massively in performance. I picked one up around that announcement, but a few years & they completetly doubled back.
Thank You.
What Acer board are you trying to update?
I know some BIOS update that works with FreeDOS.
Just basically need to flash it into a USB drive and run the BIOS update .exe with it.
There's no exe. They don't even provide BIOS file in the first place.
What do they provide then?
Also, in Linux there's fwupd
Updates via Windows update
Nothing on their download page either?
There is no download page for this particular laptop.🥲
Try to check if it's supported by fwupd then.
Thanks.
Acer has had this policy for over 20 years. I bought a laptop long ago from a vendor that I had issues with and they refused to give me support because I was running Linux at the time. (I forget what distro. Probably either Mandrake or early Ubuntu.) That laptop went right back to the vendor.
Never bought anything from them since.
What a joke they are.
Usually you can extract the windows updater exe and use the bios/bin/upd file via mainboard bios update mechanisms
They don't even provide BIOS file in the first place. So no exe to extract.