Gateway P7811 FX / Vista home Premium x64 to Ultimate x64 upgrade

Hey guys,
Just got my P7811 FX and want to upgrade to ultimate x64. Bought the Vista anytime upgrade which takes Home Premium x64 to Ultimate x32. Since I wanted Ultimate x64 Microsoft is sending me the Ultimate x64 disk for free.

Anyone done this succesfully? I have not even started up the computer yet because I'm waiting for a second HD from Newegg to install Ultimate on a RAID 0 setup if possible. If it does not work I'll run it as 2 separate HD's and regret not getting the 320GB 7200 RPM as my second HD...................Raymond

 

alright, if you havent done so already, look in your programs for gateway recovery center and create the driver backup disc(s) and you will be able to install those drivers on vista ultimate x64.

as for the raid ?
here ya go bud. raid is not available on the 7811 at this time

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I kept reading after I posted and figured RAID was out. I'm contacting Newegg now to change that 200GB Seagate Momentus to a 320GB 7200.3 ST9320421AS SATA 3.0. I'll just have a second drive w/o RAID.

Are you running 64 bit? Who makes a good automatic partitioning program for Ultimate x64? My favorite from XP x32 was partition Magic-now owned by norton and does not support Vista at all. My current back up software, Acronis has a disk director 10.0 but it's not Vista compatible either. I'll buy Acronis Home 11 from them because it's listed as Vista compatible and also runs on XP x64. Hopefully it'll work on Ultimate x64............Raymond

 

Don't know what you mean by "automatic" but Gparted is Linux boot. I would not use it to resize the Vista partition but for everything else should work fine. Well, actually I have not booted it on the 7811. You can be a pioneer.

 

Why are you looking for 3rd part partitioning software. Vista actually partitions your drives quite well by itself Just go into your manage options and you can create as many partitions as you want.

I hate partitions though, but until i RAID'ed my drives i has my second 320gb hard drive seperated into 2 partitions for ubuntu and OSX... now its just 640gb of Vista "glory" though, because OSX didnt impress me and i'm to lazy to make Linux recognize my RAID.

 

@ thread creator

i did fresh vista ultimate x64 install, and it seems workin faster than the one that comes with 7811. 3dmark score 100+ better with x64 ultimate. I am using xfastest drivers.

 

Automatic means walk away and let it work. Creating a new partition. Moving data if required. Creating a second partition. Moving data again if required. And so on up to 3 non-bootable partitions.

I've read vista's built in utility gives you almost no control of partition size and placement. I want real control over partition size..........

Not a gamer. I do photoshop. On this laptop boot drive C: is for windows-office and software. On the second HD (320GB - same speed), on a totally separate spindle I'll create a 8GB E: drive and call it windows paging file (double my RAM) and create a 25GB drive F: and call it photoshop scratch disk and use the whole rest of the disk space as drive G: and call it picture storage.

That's why I partition drives. Not only for dual booting anymore. I don't trust laptops like I do workstations so I wont create separate partitions on C; drive to separate windows/office (must be together-per microsoft) from software programs but I just might add a 4-5 GB partition for photoshop plug ins to keep them separated. Lot's of free home brewed plug in's out there that might be dangerous. Not just with inactive/destroyed viruses but bad code that might affect something else.

Well I found Paragon Partition Manager as OK with vista. It's not a free program but that's not what I'm looking for. Anybody tried it?

Thanks, Raymond

 

OK I'll try once more (then I'm done) ... Gparted. The automatic you reference is simply stacking the commands which is what all of the partition managers I have used do.

Vista hates having the OS partition resized so that partition needs special care and feeding. Here is how to do that.

 

Thank you. .....Gparted.

 

Actually it worked quite well. When I installed to a new 320GB hd, I installed WinXP first, but gave it too much space. After I installed Vista64, I used its tool to shrink the XP partition, BUT it was not able to expand the free space left from the shrink into the Vista partition. Booted into GParted and it was able to extend the Vista partition with the free space. Couple of notes: (1)To expand the partition 40GB, it took about 4-5 hours and (2) I had to run the Vista recovery to get it to boot into Vista again.

I did have images of both partitions and probably could have just repartitioned and restored faster (that actually was my initial plan), but I figured I try GParted and see how it worked, and it did the job. But with anything that touch your data, backup anything you can't afford to lose and ymmv.

 

@mindstorm - good to know. I've never had Gparted fail me.

Another magic little tool is DriveSnapshot (v1.39 for Vista) image program. Very fast and no install. It's a gun in a knife fight where imaging is concerned.

 

actually if you have batch #25xxxx or higher raid is enabled. to bring up the option in the bios you have to have a 2nd drive installed.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/show...&postcount=413
http://forum.notebookreview.com/show...&postcount=335

 

hey i have a question sorry to be off topic or not assist you RR Kirsteins,

so im sure the 7811 like my 6862, when u look at my computer you see your harddrive split into two, C drive and D drive for recovery

i reformated and formated the D drive and delete it now i want to add that 15.8gb into my C drive to have more room, will gparted do this for me?

thanks

 

Why not use Vista itself to grab the extra space through disk manager?

 

yes, but you don't need it. you can do it with the drive mgmt utility in vista:

http://www.winmatrix.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=12188

 

thanks, ill try it later on today, 3am...going to sleep soon haha

 

so i checked that out but i can't add the 15.8gb to my C drive, right now it says the 15.8gb is unallocated

what do i do ?

 

you dont have an option to extend the partition?