[REQUEST] AHCI bios unlock for Gateway md2614u (Radeon HD3200 chipset)

[NM64]

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.