Moving XP

**MobilePCPhysician** · October 11th, 2004, 01:44 PM

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** · October 12th, 2004, 06:43 AM

help= help +1

**edball** · October 12th, 2004, 07:37 AM

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

**3fingersalute** · October 12th, 2004, 07:42 AM

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

**Platypus** · October 12th, 2004, 07:46 AM

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...;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 ...

)

**MobilePCPhysician** · October 12th, 2004, 10:04 AM

Originally Posted by edball

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** · October 12th, 2004, 10:05 AM

Originally Posted by 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...;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 ...

)

That was for 6300. This is a 512n. Tried the patch anyway, no joy.

**MobilePCPhysician** · October 12th, 2004, 10:05 AM

Originally Posted by 3fingersalute

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

Yes I can.

**edball** · October 12th, 2004, 10:09 AM

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** · October 12th, 2004, 10:13 AM

Originally Posted by 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.

Yes you did, and thank you. That is what I have been doing though.

**edball** · October 12th, 2004, 10:28 AM

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** · October 12th, 2004, 10:37 AM

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** · October 12th, 2004, 10:41 AM

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** · October 12th, 2004, 10:48 AM

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

, 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

!?!?

Whats the verdict MobilePCPhysician ?

**MobilePCPhysician** · October 12th, 2004, 10:52 AM

Originally Posted by 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?

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..