Need to boot MS Windows to update BIOS

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Belair Stormwalker

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I have a problem that may sound kinda stupid, but I have not been able to find an easy answer. I have an older HP Laptop that I run Linux on. I have Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, but it crashed hard. That is another story. While installing Linux Mint and other different Linux distros to find the one that I want to stick with, I have found that my BIOS is severally out of date and there are some bugs with the EFI and UEFI on the BIOS that I currently have. I no longer have the Windows 7 Pro installed on my laptop that came with it, but I need to run Windows to do the BIOS update. The only solution I have found is to reinstall Windows 7 Pro, and I really don't want to do that.

Is there a simple ISO of Windows that I can download and used to install these hardware updates? Or is there another way that I am unaware of?

BTW, this is my laptop - HP ENVY Notebook - 17t-k200 CTO (ENERGY STAR)
 


if the idea from osprey does not work you can download a copy of windows from M$ as an ISO. load it onto a flash drive or DVD and boot like you are going to install it. instead interrupt the install either select troubleshoot or hit shift F10 to get to the command prompt and you should be able to install the bios update that way. HP is pretty bad about making the BIOS updates completely windows dependent.
 
You can often just put the downloaded file directly on a USB that has been flashed to ExFAT. Then, you boot the device and enter UEFI (BIOS is deprecated these days, more or less) and opt to upgrade the system. It'll recognize that there's an update on the drive and take care of it that way.

We have people here who've done it that way at my direction. So, it works. I'm not sure if it works for all OEMs, but it does for some.
 
That method ^^^ worked (not done at @KGIII 's direction, lol) on my Dell Inspiron 5770 laptop a couple of months ago.

The BIOS update actually fixed a couple of issues I had been experiencing.

Wiz
 
KGIII said:
You can often just put the downloaded file directly on a USB that has been flashed to ExFAT. Then, you boot the device and enter UEFI (BIOS is deprecated these days, more or less) and opt to upgrade the system. It'll recognize that there's an update on the drive and take care of it that way.

We have people here who've done it that way at my direction. So, it works. I'm not sure if it works for all OEMs, but it does for some.
Click to expand...
Sorry, but my laptop does not have the option to update the BIOS from the BIOS and this did not work.
 
To say I am frustrated is an understatement. I have Linux Mint Cinnamon installed as my first OS, and then installed Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS as the second, and it could not find GRUB2 and complained about that. I repaired that with Boot-Repair and installed openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it complained about not finding GRUB2 as well. Boot-Repair added it to the GRUB2 menu, but it can't boot.
I then find out from HP that there is an updated BIOS that fixes some of the problems that I am having with EFI partitions and booting, BUT!!!!!!!! it appears that I am going to either have to find my Windows 7 Pro installation CD's from 2015 and reinstall Windows 7, buy a new version of MS Windows and install it, which will get rid of all the work I have done so far just to update the BIOS, or just throw the stupid thing in the trash and stick to my Samsung tablet.
And when I tried to get an answer about this whole GRUB2 issue that I have been having, I am referred to a 160 page PDF that doesn't answer this simple question of "Why do the different Linux distros all want a different place to install GRUB2 and none of them seem to be able to see and interact with the GRUB2 that the others distros installed."
GRRRRRR!!!!!!!!

I will check back in a day or two. Thanks everyone.
 
Belair Stormwalker said:
To say I am frustrated is an understatement.
Click to expand...

I can certainly understand that, and sympathise. Really.

That being said, I feel it is important to let you know you may be making a not uncommon mistake.

With

Belair Stormwalker said:
"Why do the different Linux distros all want a different place to install GRUB2 and none of them seem to be able to see and interact with the GRUB2 that the others distros installed."
Click to expand...

My highlighting, and referring to that

They don't.

At a point in the install of just about any GNU/Linux distribution, the installer will ask you to choose, or show an option for choosing ... where to install the Bootloader.

Choose the drive, not a partition.

So if the drive is /dev/sda , choose /dev/sda and not /dev/sda1 or 2 or other...even if your distro is being installed to have /dev/sda1 or /dev/sda2 as a / root partition.

I run 83 distros from 4 Families - Debian (and also includes Ubuntu and Linux Mint), RPM (Fedora and Nobara), Arch (Manjaro, ArcoLinux, Endeavour and others) and Gentoo (Calculate Linux).

For every single one of them I have installed the bootloader to the three drives I have available, not a partition.

Belair Stormwalker said:
...and none of them seem to be able to see and interact with the GRUB2 that the others distros installed."
Click to expand...

Well, they can, and nearly always do, in my experience (an exception is Manjaro).

If you are dualbooting Linux or multibooting Linux, when you install a new distro, finish successfully and reboot, it will almost always result in the new Linux being on top of your Grub Menu, and show the other Linux for alternative booting to.

If that does not occur, and the new distro does not appear on the menu, you can go into the top one and run the command to update Grub, and reboot.

In the case of Manjaro, if you install it before installing a non-Arch-based distro, and then install that non-Arch distro, and the Grub Menu changes as described above, when you choose Manjaro further down the menu, it will throw a Kernel Panic.

I can show at least three ways around this, if needed.

Hope this helps

Wizard
 
It's a crap laptop if it can't do that from the bios(I have one of those but luckily I don'tand it's from 2014), hopefully if you do this bios upgrade it will have that feature available afterwards. I have never tried this but it seems to be possible to run Windows on a flash drive or external ssd, that way you could update your BIOS from there instead of having to install Windows on your main disk to update your bios.
Good luck!
 
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No guarantees, but these instructions may help, if you can follow them carefully. You should, of course, have backed up anything important before you try stuff like this.... you could brick your laptop if you corrupt the BIOS. :oops::eek:o_O

If I were unable to boot on the USB to run the BIOS update, I would probably download Windows 10, install on laptop with Ventoy USB, update the BIOS the way HP wants, then return to Linux. This is time consuming, but safe. :)
 
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