Gateway md2614u with Radeon HD3200 (presumably AHCI-capable M780G chipset) lacks an AHCI option in the BIOS and locks SATA to "IDE" mode

Communities OpenPleb: Hardware Fails
1

The Gateway md2614u laptop has a Radeon HD3200 iGPU.

It would seem that there was only one mobile chipset with the Radeon HD3200, and that was the M780G.

The Gateway md2614u laptop uses SATA for it’s internal disk drive (no idea about its optical drive, but that doesn’t make a difference)

The M780G chipset supports AHCI.

Yet, like many laptops, the Gateway md2614u has a very locked-down BIOS and does not include an AHCI setting and instead just always locks the internal SATA disk to “IDE” mode.

In our current day and age of SSDs, having your SATA port(s) locked to “IDE” mode means no TRIM for you!

(and just to be clear, this laptop predates m.2 SSDs by something like 5 or more years).

2

Let’s assume your laptop supports EFI booting. If not, I can’t help you.

  1. Find a way to either download a bios update for your laptop or dump the bios from your laptop

  2. Extract the image pertaining to bios setup from your bios rom file using UEFItool (search for string “AHCI”)

  3. Using UEFIextract, extract the IFR from the setup image.

  4. Find UEFI variable storing the Sata mode option and it’s offset.

  5. Use RU.efi (boot RU.efi) to modify the offset, effectively changing the bios option.

I maybe able to provide more help if needed.

3

Erm, you’re off by around 5 years. EFI wasn’t a thing on AMD until Bulldozer—this is a K8-based laptop (not even K10!) with DDR2.

4

Soime BIOSes from that era support a secret “advanced” BIOS menu. Likely enough your BIOS is made by Award. If so, hit Ctrl-F1 and see if that gives you more options.

I just learned about this—Phil’s Computer Lab is a Youtube channel that covers a lot of vintage and retro computing hardware, and he was bitten by a bug that plagued me for days—early Radeon AGP cards would crash on AMD boards with VIA chipsets that supposedly had robust and reliable AGP support. Apparently not, I thought at the time, and it nearly defeated Phil as well in the modern age, but someone in his audience knew the fix: Press Ctrl-F1 to enable advanced settings and set VGA shared memory (with the unused VIA iGPU) to 0.

Wish I’d known that existed 20 years ago…

5

It’s not—it’s PheonixBios.

That being said, thanks for the protip! As a tinkerer, I can’t help but want to try the Ctrl+F1 trick on any of my Award BIOS devices!