How To setup Raid 0 on Dell Latitude E6520

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I can confirm I was successful in unlocking bios to set RAID0 in my DELL LATITUDE E6520. I am now running 2 256G ssd's in RAID0. with seq read and write speeds around 1Gbps.

Here is what I had to do.
1) I had to get an Optical bay caddy, Nimitz of Amazon ($22) and put the second ssd and slide it in, and E6520 instantly recognized and drive was active as a second HDD.
2) DELL E6520 BIOS came with RAID enabled, however, the RAID default option would be RAID1 (Redundancy) and when you hit, Ctrl - I, you would only be seeing RAID1 and not RAID0.

I followed these instructions from win-raid.com, which I am posting here, with minor additions to make it more clear.

- Download https://www.sendspace.com/file/bouk3i
It's a flash toolkit by Intel with additional batch scripts mostly for Asus boards. You can use fptw to dump your current or flash a new BIOS.
- Extract it to C:\. The new path should be "C:\FTK8_0.11\Windows"
You can extract it, where you want. However, it will be easier to handle the next steps, if it is C:\.
- Start > type "cmd" > right click > Open as Administrator.
You need full rights to run fptw.exe
- Type "cd C:\FTK8_0.11\Windows" to change your current directory to the toolkit folder
- Type "fptw.exe -D backup.rom -BIOS"
This command will create a dump (-D) of the BIOS section (-BIOS) to the file backup.rom. The Management Engine section for example is read/write protected, so it won't be possible to do a full dump.
-Google for "UEFITool" install and open the above created Dump with UEFITool.
- Tool should have a search in menu, using which search for "SetupPrep" and extract the whole module SetupPrep (Right click and extract the whole module)
- Then, run it trough the "Universal IFR extractor" (Google this and install. its very simple! don't give up now) which will generate a text document of the input. I attached my text document down below so that you can compare. SetupPrep IFR.txt

For E6520, the hex decimal is 0x11E, if your PC is different, dont worry, just search for "RAID0" and you should be able to see the name of the setting ("RAID0"), the hexadecimal address (0x11E) and its possible values (0 - Disabled/ 1 - Enabled). You will also see RAID1 and RAID5 etc, which we are not interested.

All of the steps listed above are ONLY for verification purposes.

They are used to determine if the RAID0 value is actually named and located in the correct spot, I think. The value name being (0x11E). If you find, getting the "verification" process to complete difficult, then you can skip it all together.

The below are the actual steps to do for Changes.


In my E6520 the BIOS Hex value for 0x11E variable was 0, so RAID0 disabled in Ctrl-I menu. To change this value:

1) Download the following program: http://brains.by/posts/bootx64.7z
2) Grab a USB stick, create a FAT32 parition for ~1G or so.
3) Place the downloaded program on the FAT32 formatted thumb drive in a folder named EFI, so the path looks like this: "EFI\Boot\bootx64.efi". On each boot your notebook looks for this file and if it is found, it is started. If not, go to the boot menu (F12 if I remember correctly) and select your thumb drive at the UEFI boot section. You should then see a GRUB boot loader.
4) The command prompt, which you will reach, will be the place, where you can flip the RAID0 setting - amongst others.
5) To make sure this tool finds the correct values, read out some settings first. To read out a value you need to write "setup_var", to store values "setup_var" space "<Value>" ;
6) So, "setup_var 0x11E" should show you 0x0 or 0x00 (either is fine), which would mean the RAID0 option at address 0x11E is disabled.
7) now type "setup_var 0x11E 0x1" and hit enter. Thats all. Now you have activated RAID0. (You could verify by typing setup_var 0x11E to confirm if 0x1 is stored.
8) Type exit on grub or simply hit the power switch to reboot the machine.
9) Now when you hit "Ctrl I" you should see RAID0 stripe as a option when you create a Raid volume.
10) you could create the RAID volume now, or later. (Creating RAID0, will make wipe the disk clean make sure you have a clone, and a macrium backup).

- If you are installing OS from scratch, follow your own steps to do USB bootable drive and proceed, or
- If you are looking to migrate current PC from a single SSD to RAID0, then you could easily do it with Macrium (like i did mine).
- I installed and used Macrium Reflect free edition to create a image of my C: and stored it to external drive.
- Once you are done with Image, you need to enable Macrium boot menu option (windows PE they call it), so once you create RAID0 in boot menu, you can directly start your IMAGE restoring right off the boot menu.
- To do that, click on Restore tab in macrium Reflect.
- Click other tasks
-Click "add a boot menu option to start recovery environment".

Restart the PC, Ctrl I, create RAID0 volume, Reboot and hit F11, to Macrium recovery, attach external HDD with Macrium image, Macrium GUI should guide you through the Image recovery. Once done, you are good to go with the new RAID0. Crystaldiskmark placed mine at 1GBPS Read and write speeds, depending on what SSD's you use you might get better. Goodluck and Enjoy!

 

Okay, the above troubleshoot sounds like a long stretch and has been. First off, fptw.exe download on this page is dead. after downloading it from the source website, I reached an error in CMD stating that it could not be run on this platform. I'm really just trying to find a good work around for this issue. Disk management seems to not be giving me the option either, and Dell told me that this latitude model doesnt support RAID, which it obviously does. IS there a way to bypass all this? possibly format both my drives before attempting?

Thanks..

 

Guid does not match guid when trying to view values with "setup_var"