XP Drivers for A8MZN-LA

**glenglenn** · March 11th, 2009, 02:41 PM

Hi Guys,

I have a customer who wants to downgrade his HP Pavilion a1710n from Vista to XP Home Edition. Motherboard appears to be Asus: A8MZN-LA

My search for drivers at the Asus support site and the Internet in general seems to be leading to a lot of funky places, don't know whether to trust any of them.

Do you guys know if Asus ever worked up any drivers for XP?

**glenglenn** · March 11th, 2009, 02:45 PM

I just did a google "hp a1710n drivers xp" and the first link is to HP Forum, looks promising.

**glenglenn** · March 11th, 2009, 03:11 PM

Yeah, the HP forum guy was right on the ball here (their own tech). I think I have been able to find all the drivers I need for XP.

Will keep you posted on results.

**NooNoo** · March 12th, 2009, 03:40 PM

Hi Glen, there are always ways round these problems... just make sure you install the chipset drivers - people often forget them in the rush to get the X.1 sound working.

**glenglenn** · March 13th, 2009, 10:09 AM

A few of the links provided by the HP business forum had gone stale, but I was amazed at replying to what was an already an old post there to have a tech answer back in an hour with a fresh link! A couple of the key drivers were located at NVidia, especially the NForce chipset (as you suggest, go for that first), which brought alive the LAN and audio capabilities, IDE, etc., and I proceeded to load those additional drivers. For the audio, I used the HD driver direct from Realtek. HP had two drivers, one you had to load first, then the other, so they must have had a history there with a followup, but the Realtek driver was stand-alone, worked just fine. Their suggested modem driver did not work, and I also had problems with the only driver available at driverguide, but on the second day, and on my third attempt at trying the "Update driver" and selecting searching the Internet, Microsoft finally chimed in and the driver loaded automatically. I wasn't sure I was going to get there, but with perserverance, I finally found them all for XP. One useful thing about the HP business forum was them giving a good breakdown on all the hardware: You maybe had a dead link to the driver, but at least you knew what hardware you were searching for. They seem responsive to what techs may be wanting to do in the business world, like downgrading to XP, whereas the hp site for the general public is less informative and at first looks like a dead end.

I put all the drivers that worked into a folder on the hard drive, then imaged the entire drive onto a couple of DVD data disks (I find these more reliable than going for a bootable disk, by having a seperate boot disk then load the (in this case) gho files from a data disk). I blew away the original factory recovery partition for Vista, and made the XP partition the full size of the drive, at least in this case this is what the customer wanted, to go all out for XP on this box.