Placing a new hard drive into a POS HP PC. Help?

[HiveMaster]

I have a friend who bought an HP a couple of years ago (Celeron 366). He said that the machine comes up with the message "Operating system not found." After determining that his hard drive was dead (the bios said that no hard drive was present, and when I put in a maxtor from a working system, it "saw" the drive on bootup), I was going to install a maxtor drive in his system.

Although in the boot sequence the machine "sees" the drive, it comes up with an error message of "Invalid fixed disk." I am assuming that the HP is looking for the "tatoo" on the original hard drive and cannot find it.

So, the question is, can I buy a new drive, format it using the HP recovery disks, and have the machine work? Or should I just tell them that it is DOA and that they should buy one of those cheap Dells we have posted up in the Hot Deals forum?

NO I am not going to build a new pc for them...altho I could, I am NOT going to be tech support for anybody (read enuf horror stories here to discourage THAT).

Finally, if anyone thinks I am missing something in the diagnostics please help.

Thanks.

 

[dunkster]

The best course FOR YOU is to advise him to buy a cheap replacement PC and avoid further personal involvement. If he goes for that suggestion, he'll be happy with his new system and with you.

I'm ignorant about HP-specific 'recovery disks', but I've heard horror stories about 'recovery disks' supplied by Compac and other vendors.

Otherwise, I'd just generate a Windows boot disk from his OS and install a new HD for him, partitition it and re-install hi OS - it sounds like you know what to do. It'll cost you some time and effort, but you'll retain his friendship.

Hope this helps!

 

[HiveMaster]

Unfortunately, his OS is gone...when you have his HDD in the system, the sys boots up with an OS not found error, and when you go into the bios, the PC does not see the hard drive.

I will advise him to buy a new pc...unless someone else has a better suggestion?