Complete How To: RAID 0 on ENVY 15t-j000 (Win 7 x64)

As you may or may not know, HP locked out booting from RAID in one of its earlier BIOS releases. I didn't discover this until AFTER I had already purchased a Samsung 840 EVO mSATA to RAID with my existing Samsung 840 PRO 2.5".

Well, I found a way around it.

This elegant little bugger here is called the Elago Nano II (picture courtesy 'The-Gadgeteer.com'). I already had one lying around since they're awesome, so I put in a micro SD card and got to work.


My machine now boots Windows 7 Pro x64, with an EFI boot, and GPT disk, in RAID 0.

tl;dr - Move the EFI partition to a thumb drive. You can literally copy and paste it using GParted.

For a fresh install of Windows
Things you'll need:
-3 USB thumb drives
-- One to hold your Windows 7/8/10 install
-- One to hold a Linux Live CD of your choosing (I personally like Mint)
-- One to (permanently) hold your boot file
-- *Optional* 4th USB to hold your drivers if you don't slipstream them into your install image
-Rufus bootable USB creator (LOCATED HERE) for your Windows install
-Universal USB installer (LOCATED HERE) for the Linux Live CD
Optional stuff:
- NTLite to prepare your install image and to slipstream in your drivers (LOCATED HERE)

I’m going to skip the bulk detail of “how to find drivers for your model” thing. Some hints I will give though to find the best and latest drivers for your laptop
1. Go to the manufacturer’s website for each of the components of the machine. Locate drivers by their hardware IDs if necessary. For the Envy 15t-j000:

Spoiler

Validity Fingerprint Reader - Validity
USB\VID_138A&PID_0050&REV_0060
USB\VID_138A&PID_0050

Generic Bluetooth Radio - Microsoft
USB\VID_8087&PID_07DA&REV_7869
USB\VID_8087&PID_07DA

Display Adapters:
Intel HD Graphics 4600 - Intel
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0416&SUBSYS_1963103C&REV_06
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0416&SUBSYS_1963103C
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0416&CC_030000
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0416&CC_0300

Nvidia GeForce GT 740M (Use OEM Nvidia)

HP Truevision HD webcam - Microsoft
USB\VID_04F2&PID_B3A6&REV_1817&MI_00
USB\VID_04F2&PID_B3A6&MI_00

Synaptics Touchpad - Synaptics
ACPI\SYN1E89
*SYN1E89

Network Adapters:
Intel Wireless-N 2230 - Intel
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0887&SUBSYS_40628086&REV_C4
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0887&SUBSYS_40628086
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0887&CC_028000
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_0887&CC_0280

Realtek PCIe GB Ethernet - Realtek
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_1963103C&REV_0C
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&SUBSYS_1963103C
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&CC_020000
PCI\VEN_10EC&DEV_8168&CC_0200


IDT HD Audio CODEC - IDT or HP
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_111D&DEV_76E0&SUBSYS_103C1963&REV_1003
HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_111D&DEV_76E0&SUBSYS_103C1963

Intel Mobile Express Chipset SATA controller - Intel
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&SUBSYS_1963103C&REV_05
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&SUBSYS_1963103C
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&CC_010400
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_282A&CC_0104

Intel 8 Series/C220 Chipset | SMBus controller - Intel
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C22&SUBSYS_1963103C&REV_05
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C22&SUBSYS_1963103C
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C22&CC_0C0500
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C22&CC_0C05

Intel USB 3.0 controller - Intel
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C31&SUBSYS_1963103C&REV_05
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C31&SUBSYS_1963103C
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C31&CC_0C0330
PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_8C31&CC_0C03

--OR--
2. Do a Google search with the following parameters:

Code:

site:ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/ “envy 15”

This allows you to search HPs own FTP Driver database for the latest drivers. In a separate tab, open this link:

Code:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq

Once you’ve found the latest driver you’re looking for in the first link (by HTML page), download it from the FTP site by clicking on the corresponding “spXXXXX.exe” link.

1. Install your two mSATA and 2.5” drives
2. Start up computer and enter the BIOS by pressing “F10”.
3. Put BIOS into Legacy mode
4. Disable USB 3.0 support in BIOS as well
5. Save, reboot, and enter the Intel RAID OROM (ctrl+i)
6. RAID your drives together. I chose 64KB, but you can also use the recommended 128KB
7. Reboot, with Windows USB plugged in
8. When Windows install screen comes up, press Shift+F10 to enter the CMD prompt. I usually do this on ELUA page, but can be done up to and including "Choose HDD to install on" screen.
9. Start DISKPART
(for the next bit, do NOT type any of the quotation marks
- On X:\ prompt, type "DISKPART" and press enter
- Type "list disk" and press enter
- Type "select disk 0" and press enter
- Type "clean" and press enter
 ***DO NOT*** use "clean all on an SSD. "Clean" and "Clean all" are just different ways of saying "Quick format" and "format" respectively. Running "clean all" on a SSD won't outright kill an SSD, but it will reduce its lifespan.
- Once "clean" is done (should only take a few seconds), type "convert gpt" and press enter
- Type "exit" and enter to close DISKPART, and "exit" and enter again to exit the CMD prompt.
- We're done with the disk prep! Moving onto the OS install


10. Go through the various screens (ELUA, etc.) to get to the HDD selction screen for install. If you need to, add your additional drivers from your 3rd "Driver Storage" USB.
11. Select the disk, click "Drive options (advanced)", then click "New".
12. You can either use the full size of the disk, or you can change the "size" to a lower number to allow enough room for another partition. I ended up creating a 60GB for the OS and a second using the rest of the space for my larger programs, games, pagefile and temp folders. After you've chosen your Windows partition size, click "Apply". You'll see 3 new partitions on Disk 1: System, MSR (Reserved) and Primary. Select the Primary partition and click "Next".
13. The install process will begin. *NOTE* Sometimes something weird happens with the installer and it gets frozen at a certain percentage during the "Expainding Files" phase. I've tried multiple distros and multiple (official) images of Windows 7 and made sure I have the latest drivers, same result.
Simple fix for this is to unplug your Windows USB for a second and plug it back in. Don't know why this works, but it does. This is the equivalent fix of ejecting the install DVD listed on several forums - if we had DVD drives that is.
14. The installer will complete and automatically reboot your computer. During the boot-up phase go ahead and pull out the Windows USB and plug in your Linux USB. If you get a "boot device not found" just hit Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart.
- If you get distracted or wander off and get booted back into the Windows USB installer don't worry; you can just shut down the computer then plug in your Linux USB and start back up.
- At this phase, the computer won’t be able to see the Windows install but it IS there. Once we’re back into the Windows portion the install will need to complete, but we are now done with the Windows USB.


15. Once you're into Linux and at the Desktop, click on the "Menu" button in the bottom left of the screen. In the search box, type "gparted" and press enter.
- If you get an error saying "gparted" isn't found then you'll have to connect to the internet and download it. You can do that within the Live CD environment itself.
16. Gparted will give you some funky errors because it doesn't exactly know how to read the RAID at first. Just click "ignore" or "cancel" to get through the errors, but DO NOT click "fix"
17. Select the USB drive that will hold the EFI partition, should be something like "/dev/sd_". You should be able to recognize it by its size.
18. Under the "Device" menu option, select "create partition table" and select GPT
19. Once that's done, go back to the RAID volume and select the "System" partition. It should already be FAT32. Click "copy to clipboard", select your USB again, and paste the partition in the unallocated space. MAKE SURE TO CLICK APPLY!
21. Once the copy is complete to the boot USB, you can go back to the RAID volume and delete the old system partition.
22. Restart the computer and remove the Linux USB. Your computer should now (very quickly) read the boot partition off the USB and boot into your Windows install and complete the installation process.


I know this may seem like a wall of text, but I've just tried to be detailed as possible. It's actually really easy to do once you've read through the steps - finding out how to make this all work was the hard part!

 

Now you may be asking yourself "Is it worth it?"
Abso-freakin-lutely.
Here are some benchmarks I ran on both my partitions. C: holds the OS, browsers, and temp directories; D: holds the rest of the programs and pagefile. Hibernate is disabled, power option set to "High Performance."

Atto:


CDM:


Now here are the same tests, but with buffer flushing disabled and write-back enabled via Intel RST



I don't run with buffer flushing disabled on a laptop for data integrity reasons (difference between cutting edge and bleeding edge), but if you REALLY want to get the fastest performance... well, here's the result.

The other great thing is that even when selecting different power options (Balanced, Power Saver), the speeds were within 1% of the numbers above. The performance is absolutely incredible. One of my biggest programs that I run is Autodesk Inventor. Normally a program like this can take over a full minute to load on a standard hard drive, like it does at my school. Even when on an SSD it was taking 35 seconds for me to start the program. With this setup, the time has been cut to 9 seconds. NINE.

To anyone looking for an extremely fast laptop, this is well worth the extra work.

 

Hello

May you can try following scenario if it possible via Intel RAID (as far as I remember it could be possible to build hybrid raid by intel raid bios, but may be something changed since ...)

1) Create small RAID1 (mirror) volume (300 MB will be enough, just to keep bootable UEFI partition on it)
2) Write previously saved UEFI partition to this volume
3) Create RAID0 (stripe) volume on the rest of drives
4) install windows on volume from step #3
5) probably manually correct boot to load windows from correct partition using BCDEDIT utility (shouldn't be needed I think)

PS: of course this wont require an extra USB drive... (if it work)

 

Unfortunately it doesn't work. I actually did try this method, but the BIOS itself doesn't even detect the RAID array as a bootable drive. This is due to the inability to change the hard drive boot priority in the BIOS.

Example:
On other motherboards if you have two disks, you can change the boot device order

Code:

Boot Device Order:
1. CD/USB
2. Hard Disk
3. Floppy
4. etc.

Normally in a separate menu, you can assign the value to 'Hard Disk' in which to boot from

Code:

Hard Disk Priority:
1. Disk 0
2. Disk 1
3. Intel RAID X

Which you can change around the devices by moving them up or down in priority.
Since HP (from what I can tell) has both hidden AND locked the Hard Disk Priority menu, you can't change these around, and as a result the computer can't change the disk priority to boot from the Intel RAID. If we had the option to move the Intel RAID up to the first priority everything would work, but since we don't the BIOS doesn't detect the array as a bootable device and skips 'Hard Disk' in the boot order.

I'd be willing to bet this is because it's probably an option in its Business/Enterprise laptops (which are hundreds if not thousands of dollars more expensive), and this is an effort of SKU differentiation. Why would you buy a $3000 EliteBook "mobile workstation" to get the RAID option if you could get the same performance from a $1500 consumer laptop?