Just got my FW16. I’d like to say my experience of it is going great, but well, it isn’t.
Firstly, I’m extremely disappointed by the massively locked down and, frankly retarded, bios. I’ve always found insyde bioses to be shit and they seem to be getting worse. fw13 was somewhat reasonable at least.
Secondly, the boot manager is refusing to see either of my SSDs. They’re both showed in ‘attached devices’ and they both are visible to the OS. One of them even has an installed OS (void linux) on it that can be booted via a ventoy usb, pressing f4 and choosing ‘search and run bootx64.efi’
Thirdly, fwupdmgr can’t update anything. the bios version is 3.5 and can’t be updated to 4.2 without updating the kb fw, which can’t be updated unless the bios version is 4.0.2 or higher (tried it, it kills the kb). The bios won’t update to 4.2 because when I try that it wants to reboot and if I say yes it says it cant do it, and if I say no the update apparently doesnt happen.
fingerprint reader updated fine but that’s hardly important at this point.
What error message do you get? Make sure the power supply is not only connected but machine is receiving power. It will not update BIOS on battery (even if it is full battery)
it is on power. Updating the keyboard dies on ‘restarting the device’, the keyboard never comes back. Updating the bios to 4.2 by specifying the version and device appears to proceed, even says installed successfully, then asks to reboot, and the error when y is pressed is ‘no way to perform the operation’
no, there’s a 4.2 if you do fwupdmgr get-releases. 4.3 says somewhere (iirc on the site here) that the keyboard update must be performed first, but the kb update requires 4.02 at minimum to work.
I think the numbers on lvfs are slightly different, so 4.03 and 4.3 are the same thing.
I 1000% agree here. This one aspect is ruining this laptop, both performance and functionality…. For almost 2 years now.
On the bios upgrade, you can try the manual way. Format a USB drive as fat32 and put the manual BIOS files on there. That’s how I usually do it since I want to keep older versions and revert quite often.
i had to use the .uf2 file for the keyboard it also dosent work on windows you have to put the keyboard in a diffrent mode (i forgot how to enable) and drag and drop the .uf2 to the keyboard that should be in your file manager it will show up as a diffrent drive and you can update the bios first by using the .cab file also you need fwupd at version 2.16 min or if it isnt at that release then you must use the .cabs
I manually updated kb/numpad/macropad using the bootloader method. Now fwupdmgr get-updates is saying they have the latest firmware but it wasnt installed correctly and do I want to send a report, and when I say no it refuses to show me any updates. They work so whatever
fwupdmgr update tries to update the bios to 0.0.4.3 (4.03) and fails just the same as it did for 0.0.4.2
the manual method in the setup program also fails because it can’t find an EFI partition because again it’s still refusing to see the ssds that everything else in the system can see and use.
Yeah, the missing internal drives is a problem you need to fix before trying to update the bios. fwupdmgr needs a valid, mounted efi partition to place the bios update files on. If you are really determined to update the bios first, then use the USB drive manual method I mentioned in my last post.
the drives DO show up in the bios under ‘attached devices’ in the boot section of the setup menu. The boot manager just ignores them and pretends they dont exist.
Hmm, maybe the insyde bios is so retarded it can’t find already installed efi partitions? If you can use the ventoy to boot into your os, do that and try using efibootmgr to create a new entry in the efi for it.
efibootmgr appears to be adding the record fine, but when I reboot its gone and the system still fails to boot. I’ve honestly never had to deal with such an incompetent bios that cant do the simplest thing like boot an internal disk.
oddly having now created a blank esp partition on the other ssd, THAT is now showing in the ‘boot from file’ menu, but nothing in the boot manager for either ssd.
so after much dicking around with partitions in gparted, the primary ssd now shows up in the load file menu, but neither drive appears to contain anything according to that menu (one does not, one definitely does). There is something seriously screwed up with this bios
finally got there. fwupdmgr still failed to update the bios for the same reason, but at least I was able to do it manually with a usb this time.
EDIT: checked in the new bios, it’s still shit but at least they haven’t taken any of the few options it had away. I want disable pluton options though. Not just hide the TPM, but OFF.