BIOS upgrade death.... and resurrection

[Pjotr]

One of my machines is a fairly new Lenovo Ideapad with a Ryzen 7 CPU. Sold with a pre-installed Windows 10, but dual booting with Mint 21. A couple of weeks ago I upgraded its Windows to 11, by means of a fresh install of said Windows.

Then I used the Lenovo Vantage tool in Windows 11, to check for a newer BIOS. Which was available. So I applied the BIOS upgrade according to the prescribed procedure. The result was..... a brick.

As the Lenovo warranty was still valid, I yanked out its SSD, dd'ed it full of zeroes for the sake of privacy, put it back and sent the machine to Lenovo for free repair. Got it back today.

According to the accompanying papers, they had not only replaced the motherboard, but.... also the SSD. Apparently an SSD without Windows and full of zeroes was beyond their comprehension.

Of course there was a Windows 10 on the SSD. Before upgrading it to 11 (and before re-creating a dual boot with Mint 21), I tried the BIOS upgrade again. Thankfully it succeeded without a hitch this time.

Anyway, I'm a happy camper: got my blazing fast machine back. With the latest BIOS. Can't help wondering what happened to that perfectly fine original SSD, though....

[Termy]

Lol! Awesome.

[antikythera]

Glad you have a working laptop again, next time I'd recommend against using the Vantage application. Either use the legacy support bridge tool or grab the BIOS executable file from pcsupport.lenovo.com instead and install at your leisure with all other programs closed It's more reliable to run the executable yourself than let Vantage attempt the same.

your perfectly fine SSD may at some point get checked thoroughly for errors, re-imaged and fitted to someone else's laptop if it passes muster as a refurbished original FRU.

Looking at the terms of my own Lenovo's warranty, if they cannot repair my laptop on-site they will send it away for repair and replace the nvme drive. I'd have to put it back in and take my two drives out then because it's currently inside this desktop PC

[bbaker6212]

Lenovo needs to fix this sh*t. They need to create some means of backup/restore a machine if a BIOS upgrade does not work.
It's crazy that they are shipping software that bricks someone's computer.
I'm running an old BIOS version on my Ideapad because of this. I'm not willing to risk bricking it.

[Termy]

[...]

Flashing a BIOS/UEFI is always a big risk to the motherboard, unless you have a motherboard with what is essentially a physical factory reset switch for the BIOS. It's absolutely crucial that if you're going to flash your BIOS/UEFI, you use the correct file(s) for it, for specifically your model of motherboard. It's very easy to pick the wrong one, because you feel it's close enough. I would also not bother trying to flash a BIOS/UEFI unless the flashing is done via the BIOS/UEFI itself, because I don't trust any other method, especially if it's in Windows!

[MurphCID]

Glad it ended well for you.