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Hello I have an Acer Aspire E1-571 laptop. I must update the BIOS to the latest version. There are 2 ways to flash the BIOS that I know of.

  • Run the .exe file from the official website that will flash it from Windows
  • Recovery mode (from USB, but it needs the clean .fd file)

Well I am a Linux user so option 1 is out question. And please don't suggest Linux based flashers, most of them are buggy and not compatible for all versions, and can easily brick the computer from what I heard of.

So I need to flash the BIOS with the .fd file from an USB stick using the "Recovery Mode" that the Acer laptop provides.

The BIOS can be obtained from here:

It's a .zip file containing an .exe file named Q5WV1113.exe.

The question is how to obtain the .fd file from the Q5WV1113.exe file?

I have extracted the Q5WV1113.exe file and there is no .fd file in it:

enter image description here

As you can see, a bunch of other files but there is no .fd file. I would like to recover the .fd file from here.

Is there any way to recover the .fd file from these files, with some tool or something, preferably in Linux? Thanks!

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    Seems the exe is packed with upx, maybe some extractor tool can get the missing file from the archive.
    – Elias
    Sep 4, 2017 at 8:31
  • @Elias I have no idea what that means. On many forums they suggest that the .fd file is accesible if you unpack the .exe. Well it doesn't seem like so in my case. Can you please provide an extractor software that could work?
    – johndoe987
    Sep 4, 2017 at 8:37
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    I indeed saw that the fd file is not there, suspecting it's somehow scrambled since the ini file in the package suggests it should be there. I saw in the raw file: Info: This file is packed with the UPX executable packer upx.sf.net and that lead me here: reverseengineering.stackexchange.com/questions/8268/…
    – Elias
    Sep 4, 2017 at 8:39
  • can you try 7-zip to see the contents of the exe file ?
    – Inxsible
    Sep 7, 2017 at 15:15

3 Answers 3

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7z x does the trick, although there is no .fd file inside :(

For my TMP449-G2-M there were some P4KBL.fd P4KBLR.fd files.

$ 7z x Q5WV1113.exe
$ ls
$ Ding.wav  FlsHookDll.dll  FlsHook.exe  FWUpdLcl.exe  InsydeFlash.exe  iscflash.dll  iscflash.sys  iscflashx64.sys  platform.ini  xerces-c_2_7.dll
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And please don't suggest Linux based flashers, most of them are buggy and not compatible for all versions, and can easily brick the computer from what I heard of.

I see that statement of yours and I am wondering -- Are you talking about upgrading via a linux distro or just creating a dos bootable USB from a linux distro?

I use Archlinux to create a DOS bootable USB using FreeDOS and having upgraded the BIOS of 4 of my machines in the last week or two, I can say that it definitely works. I upgraded my Dell desktop BIOS and the BIOS of 2 of my Supermicro servers, and my FreeNAS box using that method.

I have also used biosdisk - a linux based program to flash BIOS, but it was a very long time ago and I cannot guarantee if that will work or not even though it worked for me way back then.

Using FreeDOS, you won't have to worry about finding the fd file. After creating a FreeDOS bootable usb, simply copy the exe file to the root of the USB. Boot into the usb and then choose 'No, back to Dos' or something to that effect when it asks if you want to install FreeDOS. At the C:> prompt simply run your .exe file.

Look at more info here Flashing BIOS from Linux

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You can just run the installer under wine, and in the <wine-prefix>/home/user/Temp/7zsomething.tmp/ folder you'll have your .fd image.

Alternatively, if the only big file in there is isflash.bin, you can use InsydeImageExtractor.

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