Updating a Lenovo Thinkpad T430 BIOS without a battery or a dead battery
What you will need:
- Lenovo T430 (obviously)
- 2 USBs or 1 USB and 1 CD-RW
- MS98 Boot Disk (choose the MS98_bootdisk.iso)
- Updated bios ISO (At the time of writing, this is the latest ISO)
- A computer with linux (I used Lubuntu on my T430)
DISCLAIMER:
As with anything that involves flashing / writing to the BIOS this is risky especially without a battery backup. You have been warned.
Steps:
- Download the MS98 bootdisk.iso
- Burn the .ISO file onto your CD-RW.
(If using 2 USBs, there are extra steps to make the .iso bootable)
Here are the extra steps:
3. Download the latest BIOS. I have linked the latest at the time of writing.
4. Run the following code:
5. Reboot your computer, hit ENTER (or whatever brings up the boot menu for you)
6. Once at the boot menu, go into configuration. Change the boot mode to Legacy.
7. Reboot your computer again, and go to the boot menu again. This time, choose “Boot from device.” Then, boot from your CD-RW or USB with the MS98.ISO file
8. Choose to boot from CD-ROM, then choose to not use CD support.
9. This will then load MS-DOS and put you in the A: drive. Run the following code:
10. Your BIOS should now be flashed and ready to go!
Extra Step for Battery Issues:
Maybe you’re like me and you were only updating your BIOS so you could then use the github repo thinkpad-ec to remove the whitelist on batteries so you could use some cheap battery off Amazon.
Have no fear, I got you covered:
Instructions can be found here: https://github.com/hamishcoleman/thinkpad-ec
These steps are directly from the README.md:
Finally, reboot your laptop one last time. Choose to boot from a device. Boot from the USB containing the BIOS patch. VOILA! Your battery that is definitely not from Lenovo or is not recognized by lenovo now works!
Extra Notes:
The repo above has steps to actually remove the battery whitelist. However, after configuring the Makefile with the battery whitelist it did not fix my issue. Reverting back to the defaults of the Makefile solved the issue. This is why I did not include changing the Makefile in the steps above.
I found this brute force method out of pure frustration. I found a “dosflash.exe” and ran the command and found it had many flags via “dosflash.exe -help”.
I really am not 100% why it skips the battery validation with the /BBL flag. I just know it helped me update my bios from 1.29 (from 2012) to 2.79.
I now have a T430 that isn’t just a desktop and can use any 3rd party battery!
Contact Info:
Email: Konnor5456@gmail.com
Github: https://github.com/ParamagicDev
Any other questions, feel free to ask. This may not work for everyone, so proceed at your own risk. I made this guide out of frustration due to many days of being unable to solve the issue.
