Motile M142/M141 BIOS Upgrade Guide

This guide is meant to upgrade Walmart’s Motile M142/M141. I’ll recommend doing it manually. Do Not use Windows to update the BIOS. My laptop got bricked and that’s why I’m here writing this.

Download Intel’s open source shell from the TianoCore UDK/EDK2 project. You’re gonna need a USB stick that you’re willing to wipe. Here’s how to create a bootable USB stick with the EFI shell:

From https://github.com/chipsec/chipsec/wiki/Creating-a-Bootable-USB-drive-with-UEFI-Shell :

Format your media as FAT32
Create the following directory structure in the root of the new media: /efi/boot
Download the UEFI Shell (Shell.efi) from the following link: https://github.com/tianocore/edk2…/Shell.efi
Rename the UEFI shell file to Bootx64.efi
Copy the UEFI shell (now Bootx64.efi) to the /efi/boot directory

I then copied the PFxPUxx_1.08.00 directory to the USB stick and rebooted.

The Motile defaults to booting first from removable media (USB stick has highest priority), which is insecure, but works out fine for testing purposes. If you need to inspect or change your boot priorities, press DEL while booting to enter BIOS.

Once you’ve booted into the EFI shell (which is really just another EFI program), you’re greeted with your drive mappings, and a command prompt. My bootable USB stick came up as FS0, so I did the following (exercise extreme caution, plug in the power, etc, to avoid bricking):

Shell> FS0:
FS0:\> cd PFxPUxx_1.08.00
FS0:\> f.nsh

The f.nsh script invokes ifux64.efi with the correct parameters to flash the EC and then reboot.

If you’d like to play around some more with the EFI shell, note that it comes with some useful commands, and some usual terminal conventions (such as tab completion and history) apply. You could list the commands by typing help -b. You could flash the BIOS this way too, I suppose.

Be careful, and good luck!