Installing on stock HP Envy (or any other Ultrabook)

[eccerr0r]

I suppose this is a more general question that's not only Gentoo specific but I've seen different behaviors of the mini-install disk so I figure this would be interesting for anyone installing... Also though this is initially for an HP Envy, it seems most Ultrabook class machines (or Z68 Smart Response) that don't have only an SSD will have this issue.

I've tried booting my HP Envy4 using an external DVD drive, with a Gentoo 2012.2 and a Gentoo 2012.7 miniinstaller. They both have different behaviors, IIRC the 2012.2 disk died after loading the miniroot in, and couldn't find the rest of the CD, but the 2012.7 finds it and boots just fine.

I poked around the Envy at first with the 2012.2 cd's initrd and found the hard drive partitioned with 4 pieces - a 200M Windows boot, a 465G windows root, a 20G windows recovery, and a 100M EFI partition. Interesting.

Now when I boot the 2012.7 miniinstaller, I see /dev/sda and nothing else... What the...?

After a bit of futzing around I found out my Envy had Intel Storage Management turned on (RAID) because the default configuration of the Envy was to use Intel Smart Response (using the small onboard SSD) - the windows only cache system. Linux detected the RAID0 member but couldn't make heads or tails out of the SSD cache.

So to install Linux it looks like I'd have to disable the cache for Windows because I'd have to get rid of the "fake" (caching) RAID? Or what would be nice is if there was a driver for ISR for Linux...

Anyone run into this issue while installing lately?
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Core-i7-2700K@4.1GHz/8GB RAM/180GB SSD/Intel HD3000 graphics
What the heck am I advocating?