[Judas]

Been working on this laptop for the last 6 hours, just kinda playing with it. Basically taking my time making sure i cover everything and make sure it's clean and nice.

IMO, out of about 10 laptops i've used, i've had nothing but horrid experiences trying to get a retail copy of XP Pro to install at all on these damn things. (although it's starting to get better i think).

Long story short, HP has there Recovery system all setup pretty damn tight, any attempt to install an OS from booting from CD-ROM has failed with a I/O error .... unable to see the damn Hardrive. Even partition Magic and Norton Ghost can't read the suckers.... quite annoying.

Long story short, what i had to do is destroy everything by using the recovery cd, i wanted to make a partition without using partition magic within windows or anything.... so i set the hibernation partition to max (unfortuneatly 1gb), and then setup all the software, soon as that was done, popped in the xp pro cd and started a advanced install, and started on my way, when it booted up, it loaded the usually setup that you'd get from usually booting from CD and flying through that, installed along side the HP home edition variation, BUT when it asked, pushed L to delete all previous windows installations.. continued on.

Volla, moments later i'm sitting with a fairly nice and clean HP laptop that runs and looks almost identical to a retail installed Desktop.

I'm actually quite impressed in how most of all the reference drivers for the chipsets in this laptop work well (although a bit old.. but well)..

ATM, downloading the Realtek ALC201 reference driver set (which is included with the ALC 650 and other drivers as realtek includes it at a unified driver set)..

In any case, with a little help from HP's online chat tech support to find out EXACTLY what specific chipsets and whatnot are used, i've figured out which drivers to load.

So far better then a toshiba and acer notemook i recently had to work on.

My HP hatred just got a bit of releif in the pc market... (still hate there desktops)

[pr0digal jenius]

sounds like a bad HDD.

Partition magic can see recovery partitions...they usually aren't even sealed, unlike Sonys

[Judas]

I thought the same thing, BUT, everything i've tried won't boot ... it says I/O error when it tries to load up anything to copy or read from the HD...

However using the Recover CD, it fires up the HD flawlessly, nothing within windows or even SMART detects anything wrong at all...

I think it's the way they designed it imo..

BUT, i've so far finished installing all of XP Pro SP2... S3 Twister drives, Realtek Drivers, Via LAN Drivers, and pretty much all the major updates and components and now this sucker boots damn fast, and whirls around everything damn good

[pr0digal jenius]

Maybe it is sealed then? I don't know...I formatted an HP this weekend [dv series] and it went smoothly...no clue bud.

Whatever you do, don't call HP....they're useless...I'm up to TWELVE WEEKS no waiting on a replacement hard drive on a warrant claim

[Judas]

i like having some fun with them though..

ask em really really hard questions... see if they can give me an answer..

i was surprised to get such a quick responce on EXACTLY what chipset was used for the audio... figured i'd have to wait a week...

[pr0digal jenius]

naw...HP gives the little indian phone laborers very good in deth manuals

[Judas]

i don't talk to phone.. i've never had luck... just use the stupid cisco chat thingy.... which tends to always mess up.... bare and be patient.. and oventually they give it to you nice and easy to read.. except for the occasionaly obvious spelling and grammer mistakes and all out typos... which frankly doesn't matter at all. (but you know it's bad when i pick up on them

[PangingJr]

for home users and for basic hard drive partition needs, there is no disk partitioning program better than the PartitionMagic.

but for you, i think you probably need to have and use a better software program than PartitionMagic,
check out Paragon Hard Disk Manager Deployment or Professional versions, this program is a universal tool for hard disk drives.
it has less user-friendly than PartitionMagic but it more like a must-have tool for professional like you.

[Judas]

i'm not sure if i'm that much of a proffesional... i somewhat still don't understand some of the things in partition magic itself.. all i want is a bunch of partitions.... in specific sizes.. that is all (i'm quite happy with just windows initial setup partition manager...)

[PangingJr]

well whether you like it or not, you must be one now. you'll need to have some of good "tools" on hands,
you don't want to take that 6 hours, an hour is a lot already. for example, you get an error when trying to read a partition or a hard drive with PartitionMagic likes can't read, partition ID error, or something like these, so you can't see and work on that partition, try again using Paragon Hard Disk Manager, sometimes it says no problem and it can see and work on that partition.

[pr0digal jenius]

Paragon partition manager is good, never used the hard disk manager.


Also, don't forget that hooking the hard drive up with an external USB enclosure to another machine allows you to do checkdisk and error checking and correction without rebooting the machine/entering text mode

[the little "laptop HDD to ATA convertor" is the msot useful thing I have at work]

[Judas]

yeah i'm working on getting something like that.... i coulda used one awhile ago.. laptop hdd to usb or desktop IDE would be quite handy....

i'll have to look into that paragon program... see how much it'll cost