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older hp machine won't take winxp pro

K

KerriAnn

Senior member
ok- here's the deal:

i put together a machine from the remnants of an older hp pavillion P3 450. i'm not really sure which are the original components, as i am not the original owner, but i am 90% sure that the mobo and hdd are from the original setup. a few things got slightly upgraded.
here's the general specs:

P3 500mhz (used to be a 450)
256mb pc100 sdram (2x128)
60 gig maxtor 5400 rpm hdd
asus P2B-VE

the problem i am having is that the system does not seem to want to accept xp. it was intended for use w/ 98, and i have used the recovery disks to install 98 and all the other crap programs... but i just can't stand it. there is so much garbage that is not needed! and i think it is the original version of 98, not 98se... there are so many errors and system hangups.
when i tried a clean install of xp pro, halfway thru setup it gave me an error: setup cannot copy the file shrpubw.exe. hit the enter key to retry, escape to skip the file. retry, retry, it would not copy the file. so i looked it up and it seemed to be some sort of app for creating a network shared folder i think. not important? i dunno, so i skipped it. this happened twice more, once with a file named winmm.dll. media something or another i assume. skipped that one too.
now after setup has finished the install and has restarted the pc, it gets stuck in a loop, continually loading windows and restarting before it's finished.
lengthy post, i know... anyone have any ideas on what i can do?

thanks in advance for anyon'es input.
 
actually, i think i have ruled that out- the cdrom is an original windows xp cdrom, and i tested it on my system by installing xp on an extra hdd i have. it had no issues... ???
 
Swap out the CD drive. Use an 80-pin IDE cable if you can, and if it's the only device on the channel make sure it's connected to the end of the cable and not the middle.

This issue is occasionally related to waiting for the CD drive to access and setup timing out, but is more comonly due to a bad/dirty CD drive.
 
ok, thanks guys, ill try a different cdrom drive. i will also wipe the cd clean just to be sure.

does anyone think this could have anything to do with that little "intended for windows 98" sticker? i don't really mean the actual sticker, but maybe the bios or something? is that even possible?
 
Originally posted by: KerriAnn
ok, thanks guys, ill try a different cdrom drive. i will also wipe the cd clean just to be sure.

does anyone think this could have anything to do with that little "intended for windows 98" sticker? i don't really mean the actual sticker, but maybe the bios or something? is that even possible?
Click to expand...

It IS possible for a machine to not be compatible with XP - usually this is because the BIOS is only partially ACPI-compliant, and if you install XP using the ACPI HAL (which is the default for most machines I think), it may have issues.

However, the errors that you have described thus far, generally, are related to the installation source media (or as others have pointed out, the drive used to install it with).

Another note and question, related to the CD-ROM drive - W2K/XP assume and generally only work properly, with an ATAPI 1.1 or 1.2-compliant CD-ROM drive. Older (some 8x and most slower ones), may not be up to this specification standard, and may again have issues. Some older CD-ROM drives also cannot read the outer edge area of some MS CDs that have a lot of information on them. However those drives are so old, they pre-date IDE interface CD-ROMs. So if you have an IDE CD-ROM, that last thing is most likely not an issue.

Oh, almost forgot - if the motherboard BIOS is old, you can override the default installation of the ACPI HAL, and instead install the "Standard PC HAL". You need to hit (I think) F5 during the text-mode portion of Windows XP setup, during where it asks you to press "F6" to load any 3rd-party/OEM SCSI or disk-controller drivers.
 
ok, cool.
it has a cdrw and dvdrom drive installed, so they aren't too outdated....
i plan on eventually updating the bios anyways... how do i update the bios from dos? is it complicated? i am not too familiar with dos, only basic commands....
 
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