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HP Pavilion Stability Problem

O

owensdj

Golden Member
I'm helping a neighbor who bought a used HP Pavilion a200n computer. It didn't have the hard drive or the HP Recovery CDs, so I got a new Western Digital 80GB drive and got the Recovery CDs from HP. I put in the new drive and tested it with the Western Digital diagnostic software.

I start running into problems during the recovery process. The recovery program gives me a few error messages saying there was an extraction problem on a file. I also saw the recovery program lock up during the last step, Finalizing Recovery. I tried flashing in the newest BIOS for this computer to try to fix the problems. I was able to get Windows XP
Home to boot, but the I still got an error message on a file during the recovery and system is very unstable. I saw it reboot during the install of Service Pack 2 and another time a few seconds after a boot.

I also ran Memtest86 for 2 hours and 21 passes through the memory to make sure there wasn't a problem with the memory module. I know the fan on the processor is working.
Any ideas? Thanks.
 
you might need to have the exact configuration it had when it was new for the recovery cd's to work right, my wife had a pavillion a few years ago and it wouldnt let us upgrade or load any other os than win98 version 1.....it kept coming up with errors and hp told us thats because win98 version 1 was all they allowed on it.....that sucks....all we could upgrade was the ram......
 
This does not make a lot of sense. TRhe Recovery CD should be AOK without any BIOS upgrade or change. It should be based on what the BIOS was when it was created.

I see something else as the problem. To restore the system - make sure the BIOS is as it was when bought - then use the recovery CD. Then make changes as needed frrom there. I suspect the previous owner mucked up nyour notebook.

I am writing this from a H-P dv1000 that was just delivered Monday. So far - a perfect system.
 
allanon1965, thanks for the reply. As far as I know, I'm using the original configuration for this computer, other than putting in a bigger hard drive. The machine came preloaded with Windows XP Home(Microsoft XP Home sticker on the case), and that's what's on the Recovery CDs I received from HP.
 
corkyg, thanks for the reply. This is not a notebook. It's a Pavilion desktop machine. 2.4GHz Celeron with 256MB of memory. It originally came with a 5400RPM 40GB drive that was removed, so I installed a new 80GB 7200RPM 8MB cache Western Digital drive. That's the only thing different from the factory configuration. I ran Western Digital's diagnostic software on the drive without errors.

I tried the Recovery CD several times with the BIOS version that was in the computer when it was bought used, but it had problems, so I thought a BIOS upgrade might fix it. I don't think the BIOS version has any effect on the Recovery CD.
 
Western Digital hard drives have four jumper settings: Master, Slave, Cable Select and Single Drive. Make sure it's set for Single Drive if it's the only drive on that cable. Single Drive is when there's no jumper cap on the pins at all, so it's easy to set, at least 🙂
 
Originally posted by: owensdj
mechBgon, I have it set to Cable Select.
Click to expand...
If it's the only drive on the cable, then that is the wrong setting. Use Single Drive.
 
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