Raid on the P-7811

I forsee you solving our problems

 

Here is a pic of the bios you may have to click on the squished pic to see it

http://img169.imageshack.us/my.php?image=biosstuffsp2.jpg

And the thread where some hopes and dreams were still alive at the time

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=257473&page=8

You will see the enable disable raid in there as well.

 

Only if Intel will respond with more specific details regarding their Montevina platform. I have some contacts from the WiMAX Forum that have forwarded my questions to a few developers of the Echo Peak WiMAX cards for the platform. They may know the answers I seek, or know who does. I tried to contact Gateway's "engineering" department which seemingly doesn't exists, but I have not lost hope

 

Youre a good man, Charlie Brown.

 

anyone still working on getting raid to work? plazmic u still using ur h4x0r skillz?

 

Ok, I have to ask. You do realize that hole to the left of the webcam is for the mic, correct? I'm thinking you are just being facetious, but one can never be sure.

 

Actually I didn't know until now, thanks.

 

Yup Yup....

 

I don't understand Gateway's decision from a market perspective: having Phoenix enable RAID support in the BIOS would probably have cost little or nothing more, all the requisite hardware is already on board, and Intel has done the software heavy lifting, so what is the problem? Granted most people don't care about RAID but for those who do it's absence is a deal breaker: why cut yourself off from a piece of the market, even if it's a small piece? Right now those who need RAID are buying something else, like the ASUS G50V, but if the 7811 had RAID support it would be one more thing Gateway and Best Buy could use to promote the machine. Like I say, it makes no sense...

 

If I were to buy a 7200 rpm 320 gb hd now


and use it as my #1 drive for a few months

then but another one for the purpose of raid 0

Would i have to reformat it?

Or is there a utility to automatically split the data to the 2nd drive?

those 7200 rpm 320 gb drives are 150$ now

 

I know of no such utility, and in fact in another thread here the poster said that Vista64 does not play nice even with a clone & re-install scenario. So it seems we'd have to save what data we could externally, reformat both drives, and do a fresh install of Vista... such fun!

 

In XP you could by cloning an image as long as you could install the RAID drivers into the OS before you cloned. I'm not sure this worked with all chipsets but it did with NF4. Vista handles RAID setup differently and I have not done a VISTA RAID yet. I have read you can not with VISTA but few believe it can be done with XP and I know it can.

I'm still kicking the tires on VISTA with dual boot. There has been some creepiness to cloning VISTA even without RAID. Who knows what that's all about. I see where Drive Snapshot has a new version with VISTA fix. Some Acronis users are receiving first boot BSOD then it's OK on second boot and beyond.

 

Oh im on vista

Well you know what? Ill answer my questions. You can definitely copy your entire installed directory to a dvd(s) and copy over a clean install of vista

so not a clone but just backing up the installed files and oh i cant remember the registry and drivers folders? nothing can stop you from doing that. Vista does need new install to set up raid it doesnt take any extra time to back up than it would to clone

 

I'll be looking forward to your report on how that works out.

 

Acronis offers a cloning software.. I used it to duplicate HDDs when I did the swap on mine. Running 64 bit Premium of course.. it's free for 15 days, and has some great features. www.acronis.com for all of your cloning needs

 

it will not work on vista, dook i think tried it already.

 

Indeed I did. It works on a single vista drive just fine, but imaging from a single drive back down to a RAID array causes issues and Vista just blue screens.. I researched it and if I remember correctly the problem is due to Vista not taking too kindly to AHCI after its(Vista) already been installed.

The data copies images over bit-perfect tho. It just wont boot.

 

Here is an interesting guide on move/copy Vista from IDE controller to RAID.
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/196922-32-switching-storage-controllers-reinstalling-windows
Have not done this personally but I'm finding multiple evidence of it working.

Here is another little chat about it.

 

bottom line

 

LOL sorry. I didn't notice the Guide was not Vista. The original discussion was on Vista so assumed the Guide link would apply. Dang incompetence ... I hate it.

Oh well, I found another source for us XP aficionados.

 

I still have not received an answer from Gateway's equivalent of an engineering department, nor my contacts at the WiMAX forum. Though I have been watching the ICH9M-E linux drivers begin to support the raid feature

 

Am I right in thinking we have to get a BIOS update or edited BIOS enabling RAID support before it will work even though Intel's chipset and software already support it?

 

theoretically someone with extensive bios knowledge could edit it to include raid

 

I apologize in advance if this is a nonsense question but let me ask it anyway:

This is the first Gateway machine I've owned in well over a decade so I have no idea how responsive a company it is. Would any of you with wider and more recent experience with the brand care to speculate on whether or not they will offer an updated BIOS that includes RAID support in the next 60 to 90 days, say?

The reason I ask is I bought a matched pair of Hitachi 7200 RPM drives for the machine before I understood that RAID was not enabled; I popped one in and did a fresh install of Vista, moving the stock drive to the second slot. If no RAID support is likely I'll use the second Hitachi to upgrade a MacBook Pro, but that procedure is nowhere near as quick & easy as accessing drives on the 7811, so once it's in there that's where it will stay.

I don't mind waiting a while for RAID, but if it's unlikely to ever arrive I'd like to put the second Hitachi to good use.

Thoughts, anyone?

 

It's quite hard to say at this point whether its an "oops, forgot to put that in there", in which case they most likely will send out an update. Or if it was left out deliberately for some reason unbeknownst to us. Gateway has a history of being stingy with BIOS updates, so although I'm very hopeful for the 7811 owners, I'm not holding my breath. It looks as if a hacked BIOS is the silver lining at this point, but there are many obstacles to traverse before even that becomes a reality.

 

They never updated the BIOS on the 6860, as far as I know, so there's not a whole lot of evidence supporting they'd do that. They still could, mind, it just doesn't seem like something they do often in the first place.

I also called to tech support and they had no idea what the heck I was talking about.

On that note, has anyone tried writing or emailing their opinion to Gateway? Maybe a few "What were you thinking?" letters would elicit some type of response.

ETA: Dook said it better.

 

this is a side tangent but id like to have an asus eee pc type 2nd laptop with my gateway like you.

Some super battery life extra battery net mostly machine

 

On another note, how do we know whether or not gateway is even aware that they left raid out? They don't seem to really take in customer feedback all too well. I doubt talking to one of their tech support reps about it really does much in letting the higher up designers know. Has anyone really let them know about the problem and how?

 

"Some super battery life extra battery net mostly machine"

It is that, and a lot more usable on a wide variety of tasks than you might think. Some have even run WoW on it, getting between 9 and 15 FPS... good enough for shopping at the AH or soloing some mobs, although all admit it's no raid platform (much like our Gateways, unfortunately).

XP is a swift and by Vista's standard a small and tight OS, you really don't need much modern hardware to make it sing.

And now back to our regularly scheduled broadcast...

 

Ya well my last laptop was sort of trying to be the best compromise it was a 14 inch gaming laptop

but it didnt run the games like this one, and it had terrible battery life. It was reasonably small.

Rather than get one machine that does everything, the only things this one doesnt do is have a good battery life and be portable a quick email check in the car type of thing.

And those things are now covered by something really cheap so its an accessory to this one.

oh as far as your two hard drives

if you have two matching now id put them in

because the next one you buy is likely to be better something like a 500 gb 7200 rpm. in a couple months you dont want to buy another of these ones cause they are gonna be old tech. So Id put it in and assume its goign to get fixed.

 

Ok i am sooo confused, i just got the 7811 and am a little confused regarding the hard drive(s) it came with. So it is 200gb TOTAL between both hd's correct?


so should i start manually installing games and stuff on the alternative d drive that i see? or once the c drive fills, will the computer automatically start saving stuff onto the d drive? i am so confused!


My worry is that what happens if let's say i have 2gb free space on my c drive left, and i install a game that requires 4gb of space onto it? will it automatically break up the files onto both drives? my only problem is 90% of my games i have on steam, so i don't see how i can select to install a game onto another drive if steam is installed on my c drive. Sorry if i confused any1 lol.

 

The 7811 only comes with one hard drive, but it is partitioned into two. And no. It's not going to breakup any installations between partitions.

 

Stamar, if you do go for an ASUS Eee 1000 get the Windows XP model with the 80GB hard disk, it's much cheaper than the SSD (which I got - big mistake) and the performance is even better. ASUS used a decent 8GB SSD for the boot drive but the 32GB data SSD is VERY slow on write speed. People running battery tests found virtually no difference between the two models so there's no advantage there either.

 

That's one approach. Many people make a backup of the C: drive and re-install Vista after erasing and repartitioning the physical disk to be all one large logical drive. If you do this be sure to create recovery disks (DVDs) as instructed in the manual as repartitioning may - depending on how you do it -destroy the hidden recovery partition. (And you thought you were confused before!)

Another option, the one I prefer, is to do a "clean install." This means to create the Drivers and Programs DVD as outlined in the manual and then reformat and repartition the drive as one contiguous disk, loading Vista from the provided Gateway DVD and finally loading just the programs and drivers you want from the disk you made. This gets rid of the bloatware that comes pre-installed on your computer, things like Norton 360 which are terrible resource hogs and slow everything down.

Good luck with whichever route you decide to take.

 

ok if i go ahead and do you second approach, the one you prefer, how do i "repartition the drive"? or is it covered during the installation process of vista?

 

There is no need to re-install anything to collapse to one partition. You can do a fresh install for other reaons if you desire, but no need for partitioning purposes.

If you just want to eliminate the D: drive (berfore you load it up with data), do the following.

Go to the administartive tools, computer management console, and select storage. This will show your C and D partitions. Delete the D partition. Then select the C partition and expand it to fill all remaining space. Now you have one big partition and no need to re-install anything.

Enjoy,
Ira

 

Excellent advice; as I said I just prefer a clean install. This method is just a tad confusing at the end when you're extending the C: partition; just hit Next with the default values and it'll work.

 

okay, so I reinstalled vista and got rid of the d: partition and now I have one c: drive, but it says 115 GB free out of 176 GB. I assume that I still have the Gateway recovery still on there somewhere. I don't mind it being there as a backup as I have not made recovery disks yet. I just want to be sure that is what is taking up the missing space there.

 

Yes, everything is okay, don't forget that you have Vista and all the other programs loaded on the C: drive, plus the 10GB or so of the hidden recovery partition. Mine is a little fuller, with 112GB free out of the 176, meaning 64GB are in use.

 

plz dont hijack thread, it's meant for raid discussions, not partition management, as closely related as that may be

 

sorry. anyway, I'm really hoping to see an updated bios to enable RAID as the consensus is that is the problem right now. we should all start calling/emailing Gateway as much as possible so that they'll get off their lazy asses and give us the updated bios

 

As linked above, there is already a thread extensively covering this topic. The 7811FX uses the PM45 chipset. It is upgraded from the PM965 in that it supports the Montevina platform and DDR3 RAM. Yes, it supports RAID, however Gateway has [deliberately] not enabled the Intel RAID BIOS ROM addon. Only a BIOS update can fix this.

 

so can you actually use both hard drives on the P-7811FX without any kind of RAID to use them as two seperate hard drives just curious. cuz im bout to buy it here in a couple of days. ive been watchin this laptop for some time.

 

Yes, raid is not required to use them. Also, once you put in the second hard drive, you have to format it using vista drive management before it will actually become available. Off the top of my head, I think you right click my computer, go to manage, then disk management, then right click the drive (make sure it's the new drive that you rigth click) and say "format"

 

ok sweet then. well i will definitely get this computer since i can set it up as two different ones. so this will enable me to use it as two different storage devices cuz i really dont want to have an external hard drive for all my music and excessive programs.

 

yes, to reiterate, it has two hard drive bays, and when using both, you will see at least two drives (prob C and D drive)

 

thanks for the help. sorry for be redundant i just wanted to clarify so i wont screw myself. but your set up seems sweet so i wanted mine to be similar. so thanks again. ill post info bout my process in gettin the P-7811FX.

 

Just to elaborate a little bit on the good advice you've gotten so far, what you'll find when you buy your 7811 is that the existing hard disk is partitioned into 3 sections: first is a hidden recovery partition the Gateway Recovery Program uses to put your hard disk back into "as shipped" state, which takes up about 10GB. Next are the C: and D: partitions, about equal in size which divide the rest of the disk's space; the Vista64 OS and the rest of the included programs are on C:, and D: is basically a blank partition for whatever use you'd like to put it to.

What I did adding a second hard disk is move the existing one, as is, to the second bay, and put the new drive in bay 1. I formatted it and then installed a fresh copy of Vista64 - Gateway provides the needed installation DVD in the box. But if you go this route be sure to create a drivers disk per the instructions in the manual or create it yourself based on the FX-7811 Drivers thread here on this forum as many devices in the computer are not recognized or supported by the stock Vista64 install.

I did it that way just in case I ever sell or have to send the computer back to Gateway; in about 2 minutes I can take "my" drive with all my programs and data out and put the stock drive with all the default Gateway stuff back into bay 1 and the machine is just like it was when it left the factory.

 

I bought 2 500gb Samsungs about a week ago because a friend with the same laptop said he read (this thread) that the 7811 supported RAID (I had read otherwise a couple weeks ago). Obviously he didnt read past the second or third page Oh well, I have 1tb worth of slow drives now

On another note, I saw mention of the hidden partition. Anyone figured out how to delete it? It doesnt show up in Partition Magic or the Windows disk management utility.

 

Gparted should do it. Download and burn to CD. I stopped using PM long ago.