My ThinkPad T460 is a decent linux laptop, however, due to the notorious support service of Lenovo, it seems that I have to but update the BIOS in a Windows environment.

After some googling, here is how to update the bios for a thinkpad with just a usb drive.

  1. Download the Bootable CD iso file, r06uj54d.iso in my case, it is actually a iso file, you can see that from the link, but somehow showed as a exe file.

Do not use the latest r06uj55d.iso, for it is not supported by the geteltorito tool, and you will get this message:

This data image does not seem to be a bootable CD-image

Probably, the notorious Lenovo tries to kill this method with this update.

  1. Get the geteltorito tool, you can either download the perl srcipt from here, or simply install it from the ubuntu repo: 
    sudo apt-get install genisoimage
  2. Convert the iso file to a img file: 
    geteltorito -o bios.img r06uj54d.iso
  3. Dump the img file to a USB drive: 
    sudo dd if=bios.img of=/dev/sdb

  4. Do not unplug the USB drive and reboot, when the Lenovo logo appears press F12, choose the USB drive to boot;

  5. In the BIOS update “system”, follow the instructions and after several reboots, you are good to go.

Reference

https://workaround.org/article/updating-the-bios-on-lenovo-laptops-from-linux-using-a-usb-flash-stick/