Sony in it's infinite wisdom has decided to make updates for my Sony Vaio VGN-BX560B available as a Windows only executable. Unfortunately, I don't have Windows on the laptop, since I'm running Ubuntu almost exclusively right now. A lot of googling suggests that I'm not the only one who's had that trouble.I even tried finding a BIOS update right from Phoenix, but that didn't turn up anything.
So the next idea was to find a boot CD, that would run Windows. Enter the Ulitmate Boot CD 4 Windows. After some effort of making the CD, I got an error trying to run the Windows BIOS Update. As a side note, the CD will likely come in handy in the future. It's got quite a few neat tools built in.
Since I'm stubborn and don't like computers getting the better of me, I decided to persevere.
This is where it gets interesting.
So, the laptop had Linux installed as I have mentioned, but I needed Windows to update the BIOS. I decided to bite the bullet and made a backup and inserted the Windows XP CD. When I was presented with the disk partitioning I realized that the swap partition would do the trick for the install without having to touch the data!
That saved a lot of time and I had Windows up and running pretty quick.
The next step was to flash the BIOS with the Sony provided BIOS update, but it failed!
That's right it failed with "WBFLASH" dialog that proudly proclaimed: Cannot read the system information. After some more searching, I found nothing and decided to use the Sony chat.
In the meantime I continued to browse the VGN-BX560B website and came across the Sony® Shared Library for Microsoft® Windows® XP. After installing it, the BIOS update finally succeeded! The Sony tech support guy also confirmed this after letting me know I should only run the Sony provided version of Windows.
Once the BIOS was updated, I just booted a Ubuntu CD and deleted the Windows partition, re-created the swap partition, with the same UUID and re-installed GRUB.
That was fun.
\\@matthias