04-24-2020, 09:12 PM
I've recently revived a Gateway md2614u laptop that turned out to need nothing more than a fan replacement to work.
But in this day and age of SSDs being standard for anybody but those needing lots of storage (and why would you want a ton of storage specifically on a 12 year old laptop?), having AHCI support is a must...and of course, the BIOS does not have this option despite having a Radeon HD3200 chipset. I also confirmed and tested that it's definitely configured to be running in "IDE mode".
So yeah, an AHCI bios unlock would be awesome, especially since it's sadly the fastest laptop I own with an HDMI port (my other laptops have DisplayPort, VGA, or no dedicated HDMI or DisplayPort port at all without the use of adapters, or have HDMI but with a slower lower-power CPU like the AMD E-350).
Navigating to where to download the BIOS is slightly a pain though as Gateway doesn't have a single product page I can link to.
Step 1 is to go here: https://www.gateway.com/gw/en/US/content...-downloads
Step 2: Under "Select my product from a list", click "Notebooks"
Step 3: Scroll down and select "MD Series"
Step 4: Clock "MD26"
Step 5" Scroll down and click "BIOS/Firmware"
And that's it - you can download any of the listed BIOS versions, including the latest "9A30b".
I do want to say one thing I had issues with: when I was updating the BIOS, I had to actually update it twice - first to 9A24 and then to 9A30b. BIOS 9A24 worked perfectly fine for few miniutes that I used it, but I had something weird happen with the fan on 9A30b initially - the first and second time when I had cold-booted into an existing Win7 installation from a different PC, the fan would not spin up despite me even second the CPU temp the second time it occurred and the CPU being at like 80C (rebooting fixed this).
I do not know if it's a bug with that BIOS or if was something with the fact that it was an OS installation from a different laptop (HP DM1 with a considerably newer AMD E-350), but I've never been able to replicate the issue at least when cold booting into a live Linux distro on a USB drive. For this reason it may be prudent to do the AHCI unlocking also for BIOS version 9A24 in case there really is some sort of bug with 9A30b.
But in this day and age of SSDs being standard for anybody but those needing lots of storage (and why would you want a ton of storage specifically on a 12 year old laptop?), having AHCI support is a must...and of course, the BIOS does not have this option despite having a Radeon HD3200 chipset. I also confirmed and tested that it's definitely configured to be running in "IDE mode".
So yeah, an AHCI bios unlock would be awesome, especially since it's sadly the fastest laptop I own with an HDMI port (my other laptops have DisplayPort, VGA, or no dedicated HDMI or DisplayPort port at all without the use of adapters, or have HDMI but with a slower lower-power CPU like the AMD E-350).
Navigating to where to download the BIOS is slightly a pain though as Gateway doesn't have a single product page I can link to.
Step 1 is to go here: https://www.gateway.com/gw/en/US/content...-downloads
Step 2: Under "Select my product from a list", click "Notebooks"
Step 3: Scroll down and select "MD Series"
Step 4: Clock "MD26"
Step 5" Scroll down and click "BIOS/Firmware"
And that's it - you can download any of the listed BIOS versions, including the latest "9A30b".
I do want to say one thing I had issues with: when I was updating the BIOS, I had to actually update it twice - first to 9A24 and then to 9A30b. BIOS 9A24 worked perfectly fine for few miniutes that I used it, but I had something weird happen with the fan on 9A30b initially - the first and second time when I had cold-booted into an existing Win7 installation from a different PC, the fan would not spin up despite me even second the CPU temp the second time it occurred and the CPU being at like 80C (rebooting fixed this).
I do not know if it's a bug with that BIOS or if was something with the fact that it was an OS installation from a different laptop (HP DM1 with a considerably newer AMD E-350), but I've never been able to replicate the issue at least when cold booting into a live Linux distro on a USB drive. For this reason it may be prudent to do the AHCI unlocking also for BIOS version 9A24 in case there really is some sort of bug with 9A30b.