I wanted to update the BIOS, but this was made difficult because I deleted Windows from the laptop. Here’s a recipe that worked.

1. Using a 32GB or smaller USB thumb drive, install Ventoy.
2. Put the Hiren’s Boot CD ISO v1.0.1 into the VENTOY directory.
3. Put the BIOS Updater into the VENTOY directory.
4. Reboot, and boot into Ventoy. Pick Hiren’s. Wait for it to boot.
5. Find the BIOS updater, and run it. Once done. Reboot, and let the BIOS update complete.

Why These Two Systems?

Older BIOS updaters were DOS programs, and could be run through an OS like FreeDOS. This updater requires a Windows 32-bit environment to run.

The computer had weird boot issues, and Ventoy has a bootloader that worked.

What didn’t work was burning Hiren’s to the USB drive – because Hiren’s was designed to work with CDs and DVDs.

Making a WindowsPE USB required a running Windows system. I deleted that many years ago.

The other available ISOs and LiveUSBs were using Windows 11, which my computer may not run, because it’s so old.

Why?

I got a USB3 disk enclosure, and put my old 250GB Crucial SSD in there. While the disk would show up on Linux, and even let me install Linux onto it from a LiveUSB installer, the system wouldn’t boot from it.

The disk wouldn’t show up to the BIOS reliably. So, I thought it needed a BIOS update, hoping it would have better USB3 support. The computer was an Inspiron 15 from around 2013 or 2014. This was back when booting was transitioning from MBR to GPT + UEFI.

The BIOS update didn’t help.

So, I tried putting Ventoy on this external disk. It didn’t work. The installer wrote fine, but booting wasn’t improved. It partially booted, one time. Other times, the disk wasn’t visible to the computer.

(My best guess is that the combination of the enclosure and SSD just doesn’t boot correctly. I’ll have to try booting on other computers, and try other disks.)