A friend bought a HP with no discs or OS. It worked a little than was unusable. It's has an athlon 1900, 80 gig HD hp cd writer and dvdrom.
I'm trying to help him, I formated the HD but had to do it on my computer. I'm trying to load my OS, XP pro to see if I can make it work.
It loads all the files but when when I press enter to install windows it says a problem has been detected and has been shut down to prevent damage. It says sheck disc space, check hardware vendor for bois updates, disable bios memory options.
I've already reset cmos.
Could it be that all the hardware, and disc drives are OEM and will only except the original Operating system sold with this machine.
I had an 2000 gateway that came with windows ME and would only accept that system.
All hardware is recognized in the bios. The hard drive checks out fine on my computer. Any ideas?
Windows will not load on one computer then move the hard drive to another and work. You can get into the files but not run windows. I own a Crap HP 360n never again will I buy an HP, I got no disk nothing, it is suppose to be on the hard drive, taking up some of your 80gig, it takes something like 10gig, it is a lot more than a simple DVD disk. Question is how can you get this to work? I can tell you my machine has had, win xp home to start with, then I have put win XP PRO, Win 2000 Server, Linspire, and again Win XP. I would say this machine runs best on Win 2000 Pro. As for making it work. I would suggest taking the hard drive format it, check the jumpers, make sure it is set as either cable select master or Master make sure your cable connections are ok. Best to have a cd to boot from, set cd to boot in BIOS, when asked to create partition, create new partition, then install to that partition. This has to be NTSF format. Then install to the hard drive. Go through the Bios (F1 at startup); look at the advance settings see if the hard drive is recognized etc etc. I have wiped out my original hard drive 5 times, reinstalled many times so to answer the question, yes you can format the hard drive and reinstall windows, Linux, what ever you want. Now original 80gig is a slave drive. I recently purchased 2 x 512 mb RAM, the bio recognizes it, but windows does not? So I am currently struggling with that. The people at HP tell me the max is 512MB, yet the board recognizes it? My suggestion, stay far away from HP, nothing but problems, Additional Problems I have had, I have replaced the Power Supply 3 times, my onboard LAN stopped working, I have replaced that, the board Audio went out, bought a new audio card. Replaced the video with AGP card. Replaced the CD with DVD burner, added two hard drives total of 3. This thing will end up becoming a server, if I don’t burn it first.
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