Updating BIOS on Lenovo Ideapad S10-2 (2957)

Lenovo S10-2 BIOS update (without Windows)

SSD Upgrade Problem

I replaced the spinning hard drive with an OCZ SSD to cut power consumption and drastically speed up the laptop. I also installed Ubuntu as Windows 7 was too heavyweight for this low-powered netbook.

However, I had a problem after installing Linux from a USB flash drive, the new Linux install would start from the SSD but would immediately kernel panic. When I rebooted, the disk would be corrupt and subsequently not boot. The simple solution to this problem turned was an update to the firmware of the SSD to the latest version (from 3.50 to 3.55).

BIOS Update (using the BIOS recovery feature)

I wanted to update the BIOS so that I could gain access to the full 1.66GHz of the Atom processor and not just 1.33GHz (see this post about the wrong CPU clock speed for details).

I found a forum post which tells you how to update your S10-2 BIOS without Windows. However, after following the instructions the BIOS didn’t update. It turned out that the file name which worked for the people in that forum didn’t work for me. This German Lenovo S10-2 Bios Hack mentioned using the filename “KIUN0.BIN” instead of “KIUN0IA32.FD” worked!

What Next?

I might look into make it solar-powered and/or turning it into a NAS with a caddy or external USB hard drives and/or maybe a security cam/time-lapse cam? So many projects, so little time.