Gateway fx laptops that should work with raid 0 disks from baked p-7811?

Hello everyone!

After almost three years of happy usage of gateway p-7811fx it has finally baked itself. Estimated cost of repair is ridiculously high and I was using that laptop heavily so it wasn't in the best overall condition anyway. I wouldn't be surprised if something different break in it soon after that repair. I've decided to get a new lapto but there is one thing that worries me.

I had raid 0 array in my previous one and all my data is still there.
I has been using version control systems for my programming projects - which is the most important thing for me - so I have access to that and I'm not in hurry to get the rest. I miss my whole music/movies/photos collections that I was collecting for almost ten years already, saved games, blender 3d models, some not so-important documents, etc, though.

I'd buy exactly the same model to be sure that I can just put my old harddrives there but I cannot find any p-7811fx for sale.

Do any of you guys have idea which other gateway fx models should have the same (or compatible) raid controller?

I've tried to contact gateway support but they weren't very helpful, unfortunately.

From what I've found on ebay and amazon I was considering p-78 , p-7801u , p-7805u. I could even bought older model (like P-6831FX) if that would be necessary.

I appreciate your time.

 

All P78xx and P79xx should be compatible....

 

That's a good news.
Thanks!

 

This one looks pretty good. Even has the 1920x1200 screen. They state local pickup only, but I would like to think that could be changed.

Gateway FX P-7805u IntelC2D P8400 2.26GHz Win7 64-bit 640GB/ 4GB/ HDMI/ eSATA (884483424177) | eBay

 

Thanks!
I've sent him an email with question about the shipping to the USA.
The price of this one is actually pretty good.

 

Good deal. The P78 and P79 series both use the GM45 chipset. All the P78's use the same bios so there should be no risk other than the GPU is slightly different. You two primary issues will then be;

1.) GPU driver.
2.) windows activation.

With P79's the sound card is different so there are sound card driver issues as well.

Just rememeber RAID has to be enabled in bios. You need two drives my one concern may be enabling the array in bios may want to errase the drives, I can't remember off hand.

 

Dealing with os shouldn't be a problem.. in the worst case I'll run bootable linux cd and copy data to the external drive and then clean the windows partition and reinstall the system from scratch.

Possibility of erasing drives is what I was thinking about tonight as well.. :/ Of course you need to erase them to configure new RAID. I hope it will somehow let me just use the already configured array.

If not I have no more ideas what to do.
There should be some way to recover data from existing array. I can't believe that if someone lose his BIOS memory (what happens!) having RAID 0 he lose all his data as well...

 

Not too sure. Old memory but I think turning raid on does not do it but setting the array up erases it. Since it is set up I think you only have to turn it on, now don't quote me here.....................