I would like to upgrade the bios of a HP pavillion of mine that PC is running Linux. The download was an exe-file, where the data parts were so well hidden that no decompression program I have was able to find it. I tried to run it on another PC I have with XP, but then the program claimed it was going to upgrade the bios on that PC… I did not think putting the bios image from an old desktop HP on a new portable Dell would be a good idea. But then, wine to the rescue.
Install wine on the PC in question (or any other linux PC) and run the bios updater there, just let it try to upgrade the bios, then it will crash, but before that, it has unpacked what was needed. I found all the files in ~/.wine/c_drive/windows/temp/pft1a08.tmp (guess the last directory will be different, but with a newly installed wine the temp dir was pretty empty.)
Inside that directory resided
347.rom CopyDisk.exe install.exe sp26713.img sp26713.iso sp26713.rtf WBDED44I.DLL wilx44i.dll WinFlash.exe WINFLASH.HLP WinFlash.sys
I guess 347.rom is the update image, which I might be possible to use through flashrom or something similiar, but I just burned the sp26713.iso-file to a cdrom, booted from that and had the bios upgraded 3 minutes later. If I had had some floppy disks around, I could have tried the img-file. Felt as a bit of waste to burn 1 MB on a CD for a one-off use…
But the PC was neither able to boot from USB after the upgrade which was the reason for starting it all … :-p