On Monday 04 September 2006 20:10, Robert Lewis wrote:
I have been trying to load SUSE 10.1 and others like Kubuntu etc. on this brand new HP Pavilion a1440n. Including some livecd's. I see the opening splash screen but then the video dies and that appears to be the end of the installation.
Also, I have tried on new harddrives to load XP-PRO and or XP but it also fails very quickly.
At one point I used partition magic to look at the harddrive that came with the machine it has XP Media Edition on it. Here is that the partition table looks like. This boots ok.
PARTITION TYPE USED MB USED MB UNUSED MB STATUS PRI/LOG *:HP_PAVILION NTFS 229,710.6 22,895.6 206,815.1 Active Primary *: UNALLOCATED 7.8 0 0 NONE Primary *:HP_RECOVERY FAT32 8,754.2 8287.5 466.7 NONE Primary
So I took the second disk and duplicated the first line above and then assigning the balance to UNALLOCATED using partition magic. This didn't help at all with installation.
I then tried to use the drive that is booting to install XP-PRO but it failed as well in the same place without disturbing the original drive.
I have tried two SATA II 260-GB drives. One came with the machine that has the XP Media Edition. I have also tried and IDE drive 160-GB and everything behaves the same. Note: The BIOS sees all these drives just fine and obviously so did Partitition Magic.
Question: Has anyone else had problems with these manufactured machines. I never have problems with ones I build. This is a friends machine FYI, and I am trying to help him out.
Is it possible that HP built some restriction into the BIOS looking for their RECOVERY Partition and if they don't see something appropriate there they just give up?
Cheers, Bob
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