Fujitsu Siemens S400: Firmware 

• Hardware
• Firmware
• Linux

BIOS

Hit F2 at power-on to get into the Phoenix-Award BIOS.

The boot options that can be set are:

• HDD
• USB-FDD
• USB-CDROM
• USB-HDD
• LAN

You can also get straight to these options by hitting the F12 key.

My standard Tiny Core 4.6.2 with Syslinux as the boot loader was ignored by the BIOS which just loaded Windows XPe. An alternative pen drive which has Grub installed as the boot loader worked. I haven't yet investigated to see what it doesn't like about syslinux.

Standard Firmware

My S400 runs Windows XPe.

BIOS Update

My S400 came with BIOS Rev 4.00.0D. The Fujitsu Support site offers Rev 4.00.0Q (14/05/2008).

Here are two ways to approach the update...

In Windows:

1. Go to the Fujitsu site and download the update (FTS_FlashBIOSUpdateCompressedFlashFiles_4000Q_1028017.ZIP)
2. The ZIP file contains a single executable: FutroS400_4000Q.exe
3. Run the file and you will find it wants to self extract on to a floppy drive. I found that if you run executable from a command line you can use the parameter /X directory and it will also extract all the files to the directory you specify. (Ignore the 'no floppy drive' error message)
4. Use a utility like Rufus to create a bootable FREEDOS USB drive.
5. Copy the extracted files onto the USB drive (but ignore command.com and kernel.sys).
6. See below for what happened next.

On a Linux system (Tiny Core 10.0 in my case) with the app p7zip installed:

1. Go to the Fujitsu site and download the update (FTS_FlashBIOSUpdateCompressedFlashFiles_4000Q_1028017.ZIP)
2. The ZIP file contains a single executable: FutroS400_4000Q.exe. Extract it with the unzip command:

   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ unzip FTS_FlashBIOSUpdateCompressedFlashFiles_4000Q_1028017.ZIP
   Archive: FTS_FlashBIOSUpdateCompressedFlashFiles_4000Q_1028017.ZIP
     inflating: FutroS400_4000Q.exe
   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ 
   

3. Extract the floppy disk image from it using the 7z command:

   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ 7z x FutroS400_4000Q.exe
   
   7-zip 9.20 Copyright (c) 1999-2010 Igor Pavlov  2010-11-18
   p7zip Version 9.20 (locale=C,Utf16=off,HugeFiles=on,1 CPU)
   
   Processing archive:  FutroS400_4000Q.exe
   
   Extracting  Futro S400 (AMD NX)4000Q.IMA
   
   Everything is Ok
   
   Size:       1474560
   Compressed: 497868
   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$
   

4. Next insert a USB drive (which in my case appears as /dev/sdc) and copy the image file to it. Note the backslashes to escape the many spaces in the file name.

   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$ sudo dd if=Futro\ S400\ (AMD\ NX)4000Q.IMA of=/dev/sdc
   2880+0 records in
   2880+0 records out
   1474560 bytes (1.4MB) copied, 0.774535 seconds, 1.8MB/s
   tc@box:/mnt/sdb1$
   

At this stage you should have a bootable USB pen drive with the BIOS update software on it. However I found that my S400 would not boot the pen drives produced by either of these approaches. After a little while I gave in and:

1. Put a 128MB Compact Flash card in a card reader.
2. Used Rufus to format the CF card and install FREEDOS.
3. Copied the BIOS update files produced above to a directory on the CF card.
4. Removed the existing CF card from the S400 and replaced it by the FREEDOS one.
5. Happily booted into FREEDOS.
6. Went into the directory with the BIOS update files.
7. Ran flash.bat which updated the BIOS.

Why the S400 would not boot from the 1GB USB pen drive I have no idea.