On Tuesday 05 September 2006 08:18, Jesse L. Purdom wrote:
Hi Bob,
I have run into problems attempting to upgrade both HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario (also made by HP) from XP Home/Media Center to XP Pro. The problem is due to the fact that HP is purchasing custom made motherboards from Asus and in these cases the Windows installer does not have the drivers available to perform the install/upgrade. I've gotten blue screens, complaints about bad product ID's, and issues where the installer cannot detect the hard disk. It does not surprise me at all that you are experiencing similar issues when attempting to install Linux. Conversations with HP Tech Support indicate that their consumer grade systems are designed to be as inexpensive as possible, due to this HP will not support OS upgrades (even if it is a Microsoft OS).
You would probably be better off building a new system from scratch than trying to get this HP to make nice.
Jesse
Bob, Try the failsafe install method. acpi=off apm=off are the parameters that most often get an install done. It costs money to do any trickery in the BIOS and like the support person said these are built as cheap as possible. That includes predicted costs to provide future (non)support also. What my experience tells me is that there isn't a driver for something on this system or there is a configuration parameter being used (possibly in the BIOS) that isn't 'normal'. Failsafe should help here or at least help narrow down where the roadblock is. Been there, done that too with the el-cheapo, consumer level systems from Dell, HP/Compaq, Gateway, etc. These el-cheapo systems are a real pain to find drivers or configs that work for almost any OS except the one they came with. I usually deal with these when they are 2-3 or more years old so Linux drivers are most often available for them. A brand new system usually takes at least 6 months before Linux drivers are available for most of the main components. Google is your best friend here. Keep that original hard drive safe because it is a valuable source of information on the hardware; manufacturer, model, parameters for IRQ, memory, PCI info, etc. With all that extra space on it, have you tried to install SUSE 10.1 by shrinking that NTFS partition - after a good/reliable backup? Stan