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I am on Fedora 37 and do not have dual boot and trying to update the bios. Lenovo does not support LVFS nor provide a tool to create a bootable usb for its bios flash.

So I have tried windows pe and got it to boot but when running the exe it says that this operating system is not supported. I have tried windows 11 to go and created a working bootable HD on a laptop with windows that won't boot on the Lenovo (gave up after 2 hours of spinning boot animation), it booted on the laptop where it was created within 10 minutes.

The Internet has many things I can try but most seem outdated, do not support my system or just don't work. I wonder if anyone here has experience with this and can give me something to try. I guess Lenovo just won't support anything but Windows for this model so I should have just sacrificed 250GB HD space and left it to double boot, I could install Windows and hope to repair/re install Fedora but that is a bit too much for now.

HMR
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    Looks like dual boot might be the only method for an Ideapad 5. If you have enough free space on the disk, you could boot a gparted USB stick to resize and move partitions and make a partition to install Windows in. Don't know if you need 250GB for that, seems excessive for a minimal windows install plus Lenovo's bios updater. BTW, I suggest not being connected to the internet (unplug ethernet, disable wifi) while installing Windows - from what I've read, that's the only way you can have a local account with Win 10/11 now, rather than a MS account. – cas Mar 26 '23 at 01:34
  • @cas Thank you for the feedback, I didn't want to do a dual boot because installing windows now will destroy grub and I'm not sure I want to get into trying to fix this. Documentation on how to fix this look simple enough but I'm sure I have some partition schema or disk encryption that won't won't work and I will end up having to do a complete re install. In the end I got "windows to go" working from an old harddisk and a usb case, just needed to plug it into the usb type c port on the left since it would not boot from any of the usb 3 ports on the right. – HMR Mar 27 '23 at 17:34
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    it's a shame they don't make a DOS bios updater - it's easy to make a freedos disk image that can be booted from grub (using memdisk) – cas Mar 28 '23 at 01:38
  • @cas I don't think the exe will run on freedos since it refused to run on windows pe but the bigger problem is (I think) freedos does not have uefi boot and the bios of this laptop only supports uefe, the freedos I created does not even show up as bootable when I boot pressing F12 (boot menu). For modern systems I think a "windows to go" on a usb 3 drive (spinning disk in box will do) as it worked on my laptop but had to use the usb type c for some reason. – HMR Mar 28 '23 at 18:55
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    that's why i said it was a shame they didn't make a dos version. btw, if you can boot grub (which you can from uefi), then you can boot anything. grub's memdisk module can boot any kind of disk image - floppy, cd, dvd, hard disk. – cas Mar 28 '23 at 19:00

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