Extract BIOS .fd file from .exe on Acer Aspire E1-571

Question

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:

• https://global-download.acer.com/GDFiles/BIOS/BIOS/BIOS_Acer_1.13_A_A.zip?acerid=634864833429483066&Step1=NOTEBOOK&Step2=ASPIRE&Step3=ASPIRE%20E1-571&OS=ALL&LC=en&BC=ACER&SC=EMEA_1

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!

Solution

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

Comments

[Elias]

Seems the exe is packed with upx, maybe some extractor tool can get the missing file from the archive.

[johndoe987]

@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?

[Elias]

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/…

[Inxsible]

can you try 7-zip to see the contents of the exe file ?