GX640 clean install

How about we get a nice simple uncluttered thread going on doing a really good clean install on a GX640? I've read about 200 pages of stuff already. My plan is to use the latest bios posted today and then clean install W7 on it's own partition. I created the factory backup disks so I have something to fall back on if I screw up. I flashed the bios already (vbios, ec, bios) and now I'm making a small partiton to put W7 on.

Normally I'll put windows on a partition and after I get it set up, I'll use ghost to back it up occasionally to the second partition. There's nothing worse than putting a few hours into an install and then something hoses it and you have to start over. I get Win installed with all the drivers, then I'll ghost it, then I'll put all of my programs in and when I'm happy I'll ghost it again.

My problem is there's nothing as easy to use as ghost for NTFS. Can anyone reccomend an drive imaging program that will work from a bootable disk or USB stick? I usually make my huge storage partition FAT32 so I can easily get in there with a boot disk and salvage my backed up OS install images.

Any tips on what drivers I need to give me a clean install without a lot of crapware?

Thanks

 

Doesn't the OS recovery options do a clean install?

 

Don't know about the recovery disk. I don't know if it will let me make partitions or anything else but I have W7 ultimate so I figure I'll just start with that.

So far I have W7 installed on a small partition and I have the rest of the drive on a huge FAT32 partition. Before everyone starts to throw rocks at me for messing with FAT32, listen to why I did this. When my laptop boots up, I have a choice between starting W7 or accessing the FAT32 drive from a command prompt.

If W7 gets hosed, I just select the command prompt and use whatever recovery tools I have loaded in there like Ghost. I don't need anything else like a bootable thumb drive or CD. This comes in really handy when I want to flash the bios, I just put it on the FAT32 drive with the flashing tool and flash right from the HD after I boot to a C prompt. I've been doing my OS installs like this forever.

I used these instructions to make the bootable FAT32 partition-

The only difference is I had to use a large FAT32 partitioning tool as W7 wont let me partition large FAT32 partitions.

 

Man, what are you going to do with 4 GB filesize limit? How will you play HD content, won't you want to work with larger files? Won't you download big game images from steam?
Just that you used FAT32 forever doesn't mean that you'll use it 100 years more. You bought gaming rig - use its power.

 

I can do all of those things. I put the large files on the NTFS partition. BTW, I have 40 gigs of Steam on a FAT32 partition in another computer.

 

Symantec System Recovery is the best imaging software I've ever used. I've used it to restore a couple of 2003 Small Business Servers onto new hardware, all with about 1-2 hours of downtime. It is based on V2i Protector from Powerquest which was purchased by Symantec a few years back. It's the best bare-metal restore software I've ever used, and I've used Ghost, Acronis, and Drive Image. Handles NTFS without a hiccup.

 

Someone told me about some imaging software that would let you move an install to new hardware, I could use something like that for all of the industrial equipment I work on. Can you take an install from something like an AMD based machine and put it on an Intel based machine? It actually resets the hardware layer?

 

Yes, I restored three different 2003 SBS servers. One of them was a white-box server that I built using a Gigabyte Athlon MP based board with software assisted RAID1 using IDE drives. I restored it to a Dell Poweredge server with a latest generation Xeon quad core, and full hardware SAS RAID5. It took about 1 hour to backup the server, while the server was running. It then took about 2 hours to restore the image and install drivers and get the server back online.

 

I've been using Ghost2003 for ages. It runs in DOS and can write to NTFS partitions. I have that and other old DOS utilities on a bootable 512Mb flash drive.

 

Well here's the first thing to tick me off. i installed the bluetooth drivers and my processes went from 35 to 41...... What the h*ll kind of bluetooth is this? it better be able to communicate directly to God if it thinks I'm going to let it use resources like that. is fnpliscencingservice?

Does anyone have a light bluetooth driver that will work my mouse?

Edit- i installed my mouse, then I went and disabled all the BS that the motorola bluetooth software dragged in. The mouse kept working. I'll re-enable the bloatware if I need to add any other bluetooth devices. They need to save that DRM spoon feed idiot software for the mac users

 

I too have issues with the BT module. Sometimes it causes my Razer BT mouse to lag a bit. I put fresh batteries and it still does this. I never had a problem with my Gateway FX or my Asus 1201n. I may take it apart and see if my Gateway's BT module will work on this and just swap them. Have you tried the default Windows drivers for the BT?

 

I'm using a logitech MX1000. this is the only mouse I tried on the GX640 so far. On my last laptop, an SZ120P, I tried a few different bluetooth mouse and the logitechs were the only ones that didn't lag.

When i did the clean install, the bluetooth radio showed up in device manager looking like it was ready to go, but it would not discover anything using the stock MS software. I have the Motorola software loaded now and despite shutting most of it down I can't seem to get the MS software back up.

Way back when, someone came u with some bare drivers for my SZ120P and they allowed using the stock MS bluetooth stack, I wish they had that for this.

Motorola must be paranoid, the have this FNPLicensingService.exe running so no one can hack their precious bluetooth......

I'm with you, i'm going to see if the bluetooth from my SZ120P fits this thing.

 

I think the connectors may be standard. I'm gonna check mine. I'm thinking the GX is easy to take apart anyway.

 

Since there's a bare bones whitebook version of this thing, I would think teardown manuals and things like that would be easy to get. The bluetooth module in my SZ plugs into a little header and it has an antenna connector on it. I think it's a toshiba.

 

If you find a manual, please post the link. Thanks.

 

Yeah! A service manual would be nice!

 

I feel like kosti should sent his friend warner a free case of beer and may
be we can get a copy

 

Well it looks like I'm pretty much done with the install and everything works. 43 processes running. There would be more but like I mentioned earlier I castrated the Motorola bluetooth bloatware.

This thing runs sweet! Unlike when I first got it the cooling fan is barely running during web surfing. The new bios has the video running at 300/400.

I guess it's time to install steam and crank everything up

 

Thinking very seriously about purchasing a 640. Do drivers come with the system or does one need to find them?

 

With drivers and bloatware .. but not too many from what i've heard. Either way you will need to get the latest display driver for better performance and stuff. And flashing your vbios to get rid of the powerplay issue.