HP Restor Disks.

[dominover1]

Hi
I have bought a used HP Pavillion A1355A desktop computer without a hard drive. I have installed my own hard drive and tried to boot it to install Windows XP. The problem I have is this. I have 7 floppy disks to put it and when I get to the sixth one I get an error message.

My understanding is that I need the HP Recovery disks to start up the PC because this hard drive does not have the partition in it with the relevent drivers. HP makes if very hard to replace a hard drive.

No, it doesn't boot just from putting in the XP CD.. I need to boot from the boot disks. The computer is from 2006.

HP doesn't make the boot disks anymore and doesn't sell them. Could this possibly mean that it is impossible to get these disks anywhere. I just can't believe there is not solution to this. The computer is fine.

Any suggestions. There's almost not information out there on BIOS settings though I'm pretty certain I have those right. I'm not sure what else to do. The error message I get is below. If anyone can help this this it would be really appreciated. Any tricks to getting this working?

'A problem has been detected and windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.

If this is the first time you have seen this stop error screen restart your computer. If this screen appears again, follow these steps:

Check for viruses on your computer, remove any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers. Check your hard drive to make sure it is properly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK / F to check for hard drive corruption, an dthen restart your computer.

Technical Information:

***STOP 0x0000007B (0xF8981524, OxC0000034, 0x00000000, 0x00000000)'

 

[strollin]

Most likely the problem is that the machine has a SATA hdd and XP does not have drivers for SATA. You will need to create a floppy with the SATA driver on it. For some reason, the HP website doesn't seem to have the SATA driver for your machine. However, your machine has the ECS RC41-M motherboard (according to the HP site) so you can DL the driver from the ECS website, DL the RAID SATA Controller diskette: ECS Web Site

Hopefully, you can boot from the XP install CD and get to the point where the installer prompts you to press F6 to install other drivers. Put the floppy in the drive at that point and install the SATA driver. XP should install fine after that. You'll still need to DL and install other drivers from the HP website.

Another possibility is to enter the BIOS setup and see if the SATA controller can be put into IDE compatibility mode. This will allow the hdd to work with XP. Performance will not be as good so if you go this route you will want to search on google for how to switch back to AHCI mode for the SATA controller after the install.

Yet another possibility would be to use a program like nLite to "slipstream" the SATA driver onto the XP install CD.

Once you get XP installed, use something like Macrium Reflect to create an image of your hdd so you can resore it more readily in the future.

 

[dominover1]

Hi
The computer used to have a SATA drive in it but now I've put in an IDE drive? That's on the IDE connection.
Maybe it doesn't have a IDE driver? Would this be the case?
Thanks for the help so far.
Cheers
Dominover

 

[setishock]

Have you gone in the bios and made the IDE drive the primary boot device?

 

[dominover1]

Yes.. Of course..

I've done everything. I still get to disk 6 and it gives me the error above.
I'm really stuck.

 

[dominover1]

Thanks for all the help.
It turned out to be a dodgy CD/DVD drive. I replaced it and I was able to boot from the Windows CD. Talk about taking the long way around.
Thanks again for your responses.
Cheers
dominover