Precision 7560 & 7760 Owners' Thread

Glad you got it sorted. Under normal operation, the front right LED is just the battery indicator. It behaves just like the dedicated battery status LED on older Dell systems. Blinking amber means that there is an issue with the battery or it is almost out of power.

 

Hi,

I currently have a precision 7560 : I wanted to setup Windows 11 to a secondary SSD drive.
When I boot from an external usb key to start the Windows 11 setup, the Windows 11 setup can't see any internal ssd drive. I tried to load the Intel RST driver : same result.

Any idea ?

 

Make sure that you loaded the correct Intel RST driver. The latest one from Dell (not one from Intel's site).

Switch to AHCI/NVMe mode (instead of RAID mode) in BIOS setup and this should go more smoothly. You won't have to load an Intel RST driver.

 

If you switch to AHCI you may want do that for your primary drive first following the steps posted earlier. Then set up the secondary. If you do not the. I think you will have an issue booting to primary later on.

 

I wanted to post some comments about the process of doing the memory upgrade for the slots under the keyboard.

First, I watched a youtube video on doing this on the 7750 which I thought was very helpful. Second, I reviewed all of the instructions in the user manual for the 7760. Third, I had not done this sort of hardware upgrade on a laptop in several years.

So, even though I felt like I did all the prep work I could, I still found this to be a traumatic experience on laptop number one of two 7760 laptops, one for work and one for personal use. One of the problems I experienced was that after removing the keyboard lattice, I did some prying on the keyboard at the location where the ribbon connector is for the track pad, not realizing that the ribbon connector was there. This resulted in poking a hole in the ribbon cable which cut through three of the wire traces. So far, I have not noticed any problem with the track pad functionality although I do not yet have an OS installed and have only booted the BIOS. However, the track pad seems to work fine in the BIOS. Another problem I encountered was that when I had the keyboard loose and pulled it up, I had a really difficult time being able to pull the ribbon cable for the track pad back so that I could reconnect it after the memory install. I actually had to get a pair of needle nose pliers and pull pretty hard to get it back in place where I could connect it.

With this experience behind me, the memory upgrade on the second 7760 went much smoother. First, I knew to avoid prying and doing anything that might damage the ribbon cable by being careful to avoid that location of the keyboard. Second, I was very careful to only lift the keyboard after it was free just enough to be able to disengage the tabs at the top of the keyboard and then carefully fold it back. In neither case did I fully remove the keyboard as just folding it back provided access to the location of the memory dimms. So then it was quite easy to pull back the ribbon cable and the other cable and reconnect them. Also, I was very careful on the second laptop to carefully inspect the position of the two cables in their connectors to make sure I knew how to reconnect them. That was a step that I neglected on the first laptop and I had to move on to the second laptop in order to see how to position the cables to reconnect them.

I hope this info will be helpful to any other newbies out there who have not done this sort of hardware upgrade in a while.

I am hoping the damage to the ribbon connector on the first laptop does not cause any problems. If it does, I suppose I will need to replace the keyboard and I am not sure if this would be covered under the warranty since it was due to user error while doing a hardware upgrade.

 

I am planning to install Fedora 34 Linux on my two 7760 laptops. It seems like it would be really nice to have my PCIE4 Samsung 980 as the boot drive but I have seen a lot of chatter on this forum about problems with Windows and that drive and slot. Has anyone installed Linux on a 7760 using the PCIE4 slot at the boot drive? If so, did you have any problems with the drive dropping out and becoming unmounted like has been reported with Windows?

 

This is not just a Windows problem. I have observed it right in the BIOS. (It seems to be a pretty uncommon problem though.)

 

I wonder if it would be better to boot Linux off of one of the PCIE3 drives and instead use the PCIE4 drive for my home directory. I will probably just experiment and see what happens.

Do you think it is always related to having the PCIE4 drive as a boot drive?

 

Nope, I've had the issue with a PCIe4 drive as both boot drive and data drive. And again, it happens in the BIOS, at that point there is not a drive booted at all.

Try it out and see. If you run into a problem, just shuffle the drives around such that there is not a PCIe4 drive in the PCIe4 slot (until we figure out what the proper fix for this is).

 

I ordered my 7560 with the minimum 256GB drive, which was in the PCIE4 slot when I received the machine. When the laptop arrived I used Clonezilla to write an image of the drive to a thumb drive. I then removed the 256GB drive and installed in the same PCIe Gen 4.0 position a 2TB Samsung 980 Pro drive. I then copied the image of the original drive to the Samsung drive. Windows booted as expected. At this point I switched from RAID mode to AHCI mode using the commonly available directions. Again Windows booted as expected. My next step was to install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, including configuring GRUB to dual boot the two operating systems. I encountered no issued during the Ubuntu install. I did forget that Windows and Ubuntu differ when interpreting the BIOS' time, and I chose to tell Ubuntu that the BIOS time is local rather than UTC.

GRUB boots both Windows and Ubuntu from the Samsung drive installed in the PCIE4 slot, and I've not encountered any issues with this configuration. I've never seen the Samsung drive disappear in the BIOS, Windows, or Ubuntu.