Bricking Lenovo G550 updating BIOS? Here’s the fix

by M

http://www.mediafire.com/download/ztmilmmeymr/Use+Crisis+Recover+Disk+with+Pen+Drive.rar

Download and extract it onto your Desktop.

Plug in a USB stick, format it to FAT (right-click flash drive, Format)

Launch WINCRIS – it was meant for XP, but I got it running in Win 7 via compatibility mode (right-click WINCRIS, Properties, Compatibility tab, Windows XP SP 3).

Make sure the correct USB drive is selected under Driver, Create MINIDOS Crisis Disk should be the only available option that is selected. Click Start 

When a “Remove your stick and reconnect” prompt comes up, remove the flash drive, click “OK”, re-insert the flash drive

“Do you want to format another crisis disk?”  prompt should come up, select “Yes”, and click the “Start” button again. Follow the same step as above, but this time select “No” when asked if you wish to created another Crisis Diskette.

Remove flash drive, re-insert, then copy these 2 files: “MINIDOS.SYS”, “PHLASH16.EXE” from the original Crisis folder that you extracted onto the Desktop in step 1, and paste in the flash drive (choose Copy and Replace, effectively overwriting them

Go to the Lenovo’s website, and download the correct BIOS, extract onto the Desktop, look for the file named “Bios.wph”, copy and replace that file in the flash drive

Remove the flash drive

Remove both the battery and AC adapter on your Lenovo G550, plug the flash drive in, plug in power, press and hold the “Fn” + “R” keys, press the power button

If everything goes well, it will flash your BIOS with the file from the flash drive, it will make a bunch of beeps, and the whole process takes about 3 minutes, do not stop pressing and holding the “Fn” + “R” keys the entire duration. It will power off. Remove flash drive, and power back on. Everything should be fine now, hopefully.

With that being said, Lenovo BIOS flashing is unreliable. I was trying to update to the x64 18CN44WW (V2.53).exe, and when I launched the flasher, it froze; the entire system froze eventually. Hard shutdown with the power button didn’t work. I had to remove the battery. I successfully restore the system with the same BIOS file linked there with the steps outlined above (pheww!)

Don’t even launch the BIOS flasher if you don’t have your AC adapter connected, which was the case for me, I didn’t even click “Start” on the BIOS flasher. I launched it and was going to connect the power before flashing it, but apparently the flasher didn’t like it and froze (I read this in some other forums, and other people had experienced the same frozen flasher)

Bottom line is, on a Lenovo, if your BIOS’s fine, don’t flash it (at least for the G550).