Lenovo U310: Clean Windows 7 Installation Guide (including Rapid Start and Caching)

Question

Hi there,
this is the first time that I am writing such a guide/tutorial/whatever you may call it – there are probably better ones, but though not being a total computer noob, it took me almost one week to get this pretty (now again) little beast running again. So hopefully this helps some others to avoid such stupid downtimes.
A brief overview on what has happened to my original win 7 Home Premium:
As some may know, this laptop is very well usable as a “Hackintosh” called Macbook clone. So that’s what I did. It turned out to be nice, but I wanted to go back to Windows after a while, using a clean W7 Pro installation to start over. Actually an easy task, format all drives, install Windows, be happy. Just as I had been doing this for years. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a real challenge. First, I couldn’t “see” my drives during installation (and thus not install), then I got random errors during installation aborting it at different points and finally rapid start and caching didn’t work. Every time I tried to activate them (after Win installation), it crashed my PC. I even found an (official Lenovo!) guide stating to install W7 on the SSD, which worked, but sucks due to space limitations. Oh and another very nice thing: The SSD showed up during WIN installation (but not the classical hard drive) stating it was about 60 GB. So as you can see, I have had a lot of different tries and errors. Why I didn’t use Lenovo Easy Recover? As said before, I erased all partitions…
Before we start: If you have a good Windows running on the Laptop, do yourself a favor and disconnect the RAID 0 disks using the Intel Rapid Storage Application before(!!!) proceeding. It will make things much easier. And don’t forget to get all you data on an external drive or something.
Ok, now let’s start.
1.)    Prepare a USB Stick with the following driver
         http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?DwnldID=21730 (choose f6flpy-x64.zip If you’re running a   
         64-bit system (standard nowadays), take f6flpy-x86.zip if it is a 32-bit Windows, just download and copy them
         into the stick’s root directory) and plug this stick in one of the left side USB ports.
2.)    You’ll need Win 7 on either a DVD (plus external drive, for sure) or (bootable) USB stick
3.)    Connect your drive/stick (with W7) to the right side USB port.
4.)    Switch the computer on, immediately hit FN and F2. That will open the BIOS.
5.)    In the BIOS, navigate to the very right section (“save and exit”) and navigate the cursor to “load setup defaults”.
         Hit enter to approve.
6.)    After that, go to the “boot” tab and disable UEFI-boot.
7.)    Next, go one more tab to the left and set the controller setting to RAID (NOT AHCI or Compatible!!!).
8.)    Navigate the cursor down to “Intel Rapid Start” and hit enter. A submenu will pop up-
9.)    Disable the first entry in that window, that will make the rest be disabled as well.
10.) Navigate to the very right tab, this time hit save and exit.
11.) The PC restarts.
12.) Immediately hit FN and F12 to open the boot selection menu. Select to boot from your W7 DVD drive or USB
        stick.
13.) Click yourself through the whole process of installing Windows 7 until the page comes up where you will have
        to select where to install it.
14.) Click on “load drivers” and after a few seconds your downloaded driver should be there. Click ok to use them.
        Please do this step even if you can see your drives (SSD Disk 0, 32 GB and HDD Disk 1, 465(<-?) GB) as you
        would expect them – otherwise you’re very likely to get an error during the install process.
15.) Now erase all partitions on both drives and select the HDD as the drive to install W7 to – NOT THE SSD!!!!!
        Seriously, don’t choose the SSD.
16.) Windows will probably say that some extra partitions are necessary and so on, click ok and install Windows.
17.) After the installation has finished and you see your Desktop, I suggest you to proceed with the next steps in the
        following order to see as early as possible if you are on the right way.
18.) Install the Chipset driver, restart.
19.) Install the Intel Rapid Storage “driver” and check the box where it asks to additionally install the control center.
        Reboot.
20.) Go into BIOS (FN and F2) and enable Intel Rapid Start (the one you disabled in Step 8 and 9)
21.) Boot into Windows.
22.) Click on the Windows button, type cmd and right klick on the cmd.exe, select to run it as Admin.
23.) Now you’ll create a hibernation partition on the SSD. (which by now should be completely empty as we’ve
        deleted all partitions in step 15)
24.) In the command prompt that we have just opened, type: (without quotas, for sure)
“diskpart” and hit the enter button
“list disk” and hit the enter button
Now you should see your ssd as disk 0 and your hdd as disk 1
If your ssd is disk 0 (that would be standard), write “select disk 0”, otherwise write: “select disk 1”, and hit the enter button.
Now write “create partition primary size=4096” and hit enter again. [if you have 4GB of ram, type 4096, if you have 8 GB of ram, use 8192]
Now write “detail disk” and hit enter to see the volume number behind the volume that we have just created (it is 4 GB or 8 respectively, should be easy to find), in my case that was “2”
Now type “select volume 2” if your 4 or 8 GB volume has number 2 as well, otherwise use the number you found out in step f. Hit enter.
Finally, type: “set id=84 override” and hit enter for one last time.
It should now say back that the id has been set successfully.
Exit the command prompt. (close)
25.) Reboot
26.) Install the Rapid Start driver. Reboot.
27.) Open the Intel Rapid Storage Application.
28.) Click on accelerate and approve the settings. Two RAID’s will be created. Reboot.
29.) Install the remaining drivers, have fun with Windows Update and that’s it!
Good luck to all of you… And hey Lenovo - wouldn't that have been your job after all these posts showing your costumers in trouble? Just my two cents...
If you want, you can now turn on UEFI-boot in BIOS.
PS: If, after installing all drivers, you happen to see one unknown device in your device manager – this one belongs to Lenovo Connect Software that came with your Laptop. (Updates FB, Email etc when PC is in sleep mode) If you install Lenovo Connect it’s going to be fine, however, I would not recommend it as it is said to use a lot of energy and cause some other problems. So just live with it, your PC is totally fine without it.
Kind regards from Shanghai

Answer 1

Seriously guys, I can't use my 3 days old laptop. Some help would be mostly appreciated. At this point, the network connection issue doesn't show up anymore, it's just a blank screen after reboot. I reinstall windows and do it all over again just to achieve the same result.
Now couple of things caught my attention: as I load the "6flpy-x64.zip" driver from step 14, I get a message saying I need to install signed drivers, because unsigned ones are likely to mess up the system.
Secondly, I could not find any Rapid Storage Technology drivers for Windows 7 (particularly for U310 model), so I use the Windows 8 ones (http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloads/detail.page?DocID=DS031455), which seems a silly thing, yet I know of no alternatives.
Could it be any of these issues to cause my problem? Or smth else? Please help!