My 7801u is here! too bad it's dead

been fence sitting on this one for a few weeks with the whole resolution diff issue at BestBuy (I want the 19x12) and when newegg dropped the price on the 7801u last thursday I went for it. Waited for it through the weekend and when it wasn't here when I got home from work today I resigned myself to waiting until tomorrow; but then the doorbell rang at 7:15 and there it was sitting on my steps! brought it in and opened it up, popped the battery on and pushed the power button.....blinking cursor . shut down, waited a min, turned it back on....windows boot screen, this is more like it. nope, never got past the BS animated loading bar logo. tried a few things, checked bios, different boot menu options but it's pooched; the best it can do is sit for 3mins with the blinking cursor before spitting out the "OS not found" message . what a kick in the jubbs. have to decide if I want to pop the HDD and run a check on it or just RMA with newegg and deal with waiting a week+ to get it sorted out. baaah...

well at least if my house floods I can use it to float me and my entire family to safety

 

May we assume that you plugged it in using the power supply "brick" and the "charging" light comes on in the front of the unit?

 

Run a hard drive test on it, it sounds like a bad hard drive to me.
Could have been mis-handled in shipping.

 

yea, plugged it in ( is that brick huge) and get a charge light. 98% sure its the HDD, the newegg box doesn't look like it was exactly handled with kid gloves. I'm going to end up paying to ship back a 17lb box for a half lb part

 

You might take pictures of the damaged box, too.

Is it possible that the drive just needs to be "re-seated"?

 

The brown newegg box was a bit banged up but the Gateway box was fine so I had hope, maybe I will snap a few quick pics before I put it all back together though (if it comes to that). I had the same thought about the re-seat, maybe I'll give it a try...what a PITA

 

Sorry to hear you got hosed with the dead drive.

You might can just call newegg and see if they can swap drives for you. Only problem there is if you dont have an OS to put on the machine.
But luckily there is Linux and Win7 so you do have free options (though hunting down the drivers might be a pain for win7)

Let us know how newegg wants to do it. Maybe they wont be evil and will work with you to get everything sorted out.

 

I'm sure you will get taken care of one way or another. However this is why I don't mail order things like this.

 

I'm the same way, too bad Gateway didn't give me a way to walk into a local store and walk out with this machine

I used my HDD dock to attach the drive to my workstation and I can see all the files on the partition. I let it get halfway through a sector scan before I cancelled out. I have the drive back in the FX and am trying to boot to the Gateway recovery partition but the manual says ALT+F10 and that's only bringing up the regular boot menu

 

I believe at windows boot you need to F8 and select repair computer.........

 

That's the windows recovery console process, I can't get to windows boot because of the NO OS FOUND message...I need to get to the Gateway recovery partition because Gateway needed to save $.75 by not tossing a DVD in the box

 

Why not download a Linux LiveCD and use that to see if you can actually access the drive. If you can you might be able to pull off the recovery files and make your boot disc to try a clean install.

But if the drive is really bad thats not going to help much

 

friggin amazing....on a hunch I switched the HDD controller mode from ACHI (whatever) to IDE and it started to boot to vista then blue screened. when it came back up and asked if I wanted to start windows normally I chose "fix this crap" (not exact wording). of course that said it couldn't do an automated fix of anything. I had a similar issue when I flipped my workstation from IDE to ACHI to setup a new raid set, vista puked all over itself trying to boot up. I had to boot off the eSATA port, which was a different chipset and load the Intel RAID driver into vista then put the drive back on the Intel controller. but why the eff is this crap happening on a brand new clean machine?!?!? argggg

 

ok, I was able to get into the Gateway recovery console with the controller set to IDE mode, it's "restoring" the drive now.....will update when it's done, or when I wake up if I fall asleep before it's done :-/

 

Pretty much if it works for vista it works for windows 7. Our pc's CAME with vista 64 so we have all the vista 64 support from gateway that will be compatible with windows 7 64 bit.

XP is much more of a pain, 7 is eeeasssyyyy

 

Aaaaaand we're back. well, not back since the thing never actually worked out of the box, but it's booted into Vista now. I need to load the RAID drivers and then flip the controller back into AHCI mode and try and boot again...but that's not happening tonight seeing how I have to be up at 5:20am to get my train to work. If I hadn't bumped into a similar issue a few weeks ago with my workstation how the explative would I have even known to try switching the controller mode? and why didn't it work out of the box? interested to hear if anyone else has a similar issue, I know a few of you bought the same thing I did at the same time I did from the same place I did......

flippin wierd stuff

 

So it's working fine now?

Run memtest, hd tune test, orthos prime, etc to see if everything is fine before you have to deal with gateway (not saying they're bad but newegg is 100x better).

If you're still having problems install a fresh copy and if you don't have a vista dics just download and burn the windows 7 beta from a different computer. I'm using 7 and it's a lot sleeker than vista. Found every single driver except the modem. If installing a fresh copy doesn't work best to RMA it and get another one.

GL!

 

good call, I'm going to run a battery of tests when I get home tonight and make sure all the pieces parts check out.

Last night after it booted into windows for the first time it started installing some extra gateway stuff for the webcam and other bits and I decided to just to go sleep. When I woke up this morning it was sitting there waiting for me to login and when I did it loaded normally, so I have hopes that I'll get to keep my new toy and not have to deal with an RMA. I will say that NewEgg has been eggcellent (groan) with RMA situations in the past so if I have to go that route I have no reason to think they won't take care of me.

 

What a story!!!

And a Hollywood ending to top it off!!!

 

At one time Gateway did have stores. When I worked for Compaq computers, Gateway opened a store right down the road from Compaq's headquarters.

But you could not walk in and walk out with a computer, they were just places to demo their computers and when you selected a model they were still shipped to you. Kind of like the Dell stores in the malls, which appear to have closed as well.

 

is it just my imagination or like half of ppls who bought 7801u has either white blotch screen issue or DOA or their notebook dying in matter of days?
i read reviews and it seems like half of them who got it from newegg.com has
one of those problems. lucky for me i bought it from best buy so they took care of my white blotch screen problem(though i had to waste nearly 2 hours
arguing with managers to get another 1920x1200 screen).