Moving XP

[MobilePCPhysician]

Customer has Hp Pavilion 512n. Needs Ati or Nvidea video to play Sims game. No agp slot on m/board. We tell him we'll upgrade to 2.4 celeron and board with agp plus the ati card. Put it in new case, remove hard drive. Install in new machine, run repiar install off of Win xp home cd. Repair appears to work. Start, does not load os, just sits there and blinks at me. Have done this on dozens of other machines with success. Does Hp do something to the drives? Are they "locked" or something?

Help

[MobilePCPhysician]

help= help +1http://forums.windrivers.com/images/smilies/tongue.gif

[edball]

Have you tried a clean install (on another drive) to make sure something else isn't wrong ?

[3fingersalute]

If you boot to the recovery console, can you access the drive??

[Platypus]

If you did a Repair Install from a standard issue XP SP1, you may have a case of the file version incompatability that can happen with Pavilions, between the original HP install & the MS one.

This may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q329450

Your situation may be the last symptom nominated:

"If you try to reinstall Windows XP SP1, the installation is unsuccessful."

(Edit: Although, this looks as though it only applies to recovery to original HP spec, which is not what you want... HP ... :rolleyes: )

[MobilePCPhysician]

Have you tried a clean install (on another drive) to make sure something else isn't wrong ?Did a system recovery with the drive in the pavilion, worked fine. Take the drive over to the new system, do a repair install with a sp1 xp home disc, it appears to recover, but when it reboots, it just flashes a vertical bar at me.

[MobilePCPhysician]

If you did a Repair Install from a standard issue XP SP1, you may have a case of the file version incompatability that can happen with Pavilions, between the original HP install & the MS one.

This may help:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q329450

Your situation may be the last symptom nominated:

"If you try to reinstall Windows XP SP1, the installation is unsuccessful."

(Edit: Although, this looks as though it only applies to recovery to original HP spec, which is not what you want... HP ... :rolleyes: )
That was for 6300. This is a 512n. Tried the patch anyway, no joy.

[MobilePCPhysician]

If you boot to the recovery console, can you access the drive??Yes I can.

[edball]

This used to work for me. Instead of choosing the first repair option, I would just tell it to install the OS, it would then find the XP partition and ask me if I wanted to repair it (2nd repair option). I would choose yes and it would basically do a reinstall but kept all my programs in place. Hope I explained this well enough.

[MobilePCPhysician]

This used to work for me. Instead of choosing the first repair option, I would just tell it to install the OS, it would then find the XP partition and ask me if I wanted to repair it (2nd repair option). I would choose yes and it would basically do a reinstall but kept all my programs in place. Hope I explained this well enough.
Yes you did, and thank you. That is what I have been doing though.

[edball]

You could try installing it to a different directory (clean install) like windows2, and seeing if you can even get it to work. You can always change the boot directory back by editing c:\boot.ini.

[NooNoo]

HP has a recovery partition and I would not be surprised if they hadn't done something to the mbr

You tried a fixboot and fixmbr from repair console?

[GrandDad]

Don't all the PC makers still do thier Recovery CD's that it checks BIOS serial No# or whatever it was and not install if No# didn't fall in a certain No# range ? and once installed on Hdd it puts the same little proggy somewhere so if you clone Hdd or move it to different PC it checks BIOS and won't Boot even doing a Repair install from a standard CD because it doesn't overwrite that little proggy ?
It never worked for me , always had to wipe Hdd and MBR and use a standard CD .
Just a thought .

edit
like what Noo's saying above

[confus-ed]

Can I chip in now & annoy everyone by saying its a lot quicker to do fresh setup when you change boards if it doesn't work straight off ?

Whether I can or not I just did :D, I just use the files & setting transfer whatnot or do a backup & then restore it minus the hardware keys, I like my nice clean installs ;)

Here by way of my flying guess at explanation I shall offer to spit on HP & leave it at that :devil: !?!? :D

Whats the verdict MobilePCPhysician ?

[MobilePCPhysician]

HP has a recovery partition and I would not be surprised if they hadn't done something to the mbr

You tried a fixboot and fixmbr from repair console?Yes I did. Took the drive out and put it in an external case and hooked it up to our main computer, running xp pro. Windows doesn't recognize the drive. Partition Magic says something about chs being one number on one area, and another number in 2 other areas. If I allow Partition Magic to fix the problem, the drive is useless everywhere. If I tell it to not repair the discrepancy, the error code is 117, and it says the drive is bad. Drive diagnostics say the drive is good, no matter what machine it's put in.


Well, time to pull off the data, format and re-install. Thanks to all who gave it a go..

[confus-ed]

Partition Magic says something about chs being one number on one area, and another number in 2 other areas. If I allow Partition Magic to fix the problem, the drive is useless everywhere. If I tell it to not repair the discrepancy, the error code is 117, and it says the drive is bad

So that tells you (well me & I'll tell you :D) the original format was probably not done right or by some non standard thing like pm ! there's all that cyclinder boundaries & stuff I always quote, but I'm never sure how to explain in two sentences - Quite often this can be reason for a repair install going wrong anyway, so I'll still spit on Hp, as I bet they did it in the first place ;)

btw - I've never found a practical way to fix it up other than exactly what you are finding yourself doing now ;)

[MobilePCPhysician]

For grins, (and what's another hour or two), we took a blank drive and used Hp recovery disks, (all eight of them), installed everything just like out of the box. Shut it down, put it in another box, and Partition Magic said the same thing. So it appears they are doing something to the formatting. I remember Western Digital or Maxtor? doing something similar, where the sector 63 offset was used. I think then it was like a drive overlay to help the bios detect the whole drive.

Who says education isn't expensive?http://forums.windrivers.com/images/smilies/tongue.gifhttp://forums.windrivers.com/images/smilies/sagrin.gif

And thanks to all who tried to help.

[confus-ed]

This is what you get for using images :p instead of formatting 'properly' & doing it the hard way, so I spit yet more on Hpoohey :D

I keep finding myself saying that imaging tools are not always the tool for the job & I think this is a classic example of how someone else not understanding can cause 'unforseen' troubles .. so a techo wotpp :D

Get a run of say 60gb disks & format them & watch what happens, if you've got a decent span of disks (so not all from the same production run) then you'll find when formatted they all come out slightly different in capacity terms - overlay that with a standard image (complete of course with its own MFT & bootsector based on the images size & NOT the disks real size) & hey presto you are as dumb as the bloke at hp ;)

Its all to do with calculating physical cyclinder boundaries for the logical offsets to work, one must start the disk & one must fall at the end of the disk (& then work out the others in between) - put an image on it & you transfer the mft & MBR from the image to the disk - errr wrong ! you don't want that at all, unless you fix it first, some stuff can do this right & some stuff can't & some can do it right for some file systems & some can't (they all got better btw - they are on to this but not perfect yet & older copies are worse for this).

This about logical vs physical disk geography refers (http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/geom/geom.htm)

So it appears they are doing something to the formatting
IMO all that lot above answers what they are doing wrong, using crap imaging tools :D & effectively not getting the formatting right at all :thumbs: