alright, so I have a compaq evo w4000, running ubuntu 9.10. with a dell processor in it. (yes I know its a mess) so basically, I need a microcode patch that will work with all this. Does anyone have any ideas? I already downloaded SP24303.exe, which was for the compaq evo w4000. yet WINE fails to actually do anything with the file.
Microcode? SP24303.exe is a BIOS update. Microcode is something rather different.
SP24303.exe is a self-extracting archive, which can be extracted with 7-zip on Linux.
$ 7z x sp24303.exe
The result will be two files, copydisk.exe and 686Y2.IMG. Knowing Compaq's standard practice, 686Y2.IMG is a floppy disk image... but it's exactly 32 bytes longer than a standard 1.44 M disk image.
It turns out the first 32 bytes are a header for copydisk.exe. Let's strip it away and see if Linux can access it as a FAT filesystem image:
$ dd if=686Y2.IMG bs=32 skip=1 of=686y2-linux.img 46080+0 records in 46080+0 records out 1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 0.0763746 s, 19.3 MB/s $ file 686y2-linux.img 686y2-linux.img: DOS floppy 1440k, x86 hard disk boot sector
The result is a plain FAT filesystem image which can be mounted for examination:
You might wish to write the image to a disk, and run the BIOS update by booting the system from it. Just insert a disk and run this command:
$ sudo dd if=686y2-linux.img bs=512 of=/dev/fd0 2880+0 records in 2880+0 records out 1474560 bytes (1.5 MB) copied, 0.00208399 s, 708 MB/s
Looks like we did not need that copydisk.exe at all.
Alternatively, you might wish to generate a bootable CD for the update, if you don't happen to have 3.5" floppy disks around.
This will create an ISO image file named "evo-w4000-biosupdate.iso", which can then be burned onto CD using the "Burn CD Image" function of your favorite CD-R burning program:
