new hard drive! old drivers dont seem to work?

wardD · 07-13-2002, 05:10 PM

hi all

well the wifes hdd packed it in(I think).
anyway, I went to 3 diferant comp stores and inquired about hdd,s. well got three conflicting tales as to what size drive I could install on an HP 433mhz pavilion.

a 40 gig was in my price range so i pick one up.

i used the easy install prog that came with the drive and the insallation went pretty good till i went to load windows and all I had avaliable at the time was win 95 and the win 98 upgrade.

i used a win 98 boot disk when prompted to insert the boot disk for the os I would be running, not thinking that I would be starting out with win 95 then upgrading.

win 95 dosent suport 40 gig drives!

anyway, I got my win98se disk back and got the os loaded with 39.some odd gigs avaliable free space, I am a happy boy!

I have got the drivers for this computer from HP, used them once before when we did the one and only format on the wifes machine and they made every thing work.

I ran them this time and they seem to load up ok, but they dont do anything.

up untill i pulled the hard drive from this unit i always thought you had a sound card, a video card etc..

well much to my horror, this thing has a combo card( a rockwell i beleive). it has the graphics,modem, and is also linked some how or another to the sound card, ( and it does look like a mini card where the speaker jacks plug in) cause when it is runing like it did when new( original config) the modem would do its beeps and whistle thing over the speakers as aposed to noise coming from within the tower.

now what I am wondering, since the drivers worked once before after a simple format. is, by using the easy install disk that came with the new drive, would that have changed my bios settings, and would that change effect how it was to look for hardware and stuff?

i noticed that when you boot up their is no longer a blue HP screen. I have formated my computer a dozen or so times and i still get the hp screen on start up?

http://www.hp.com/cposupport/persona.../bph04945.html this is a link to the factory specks for this machine. I have got the rage vid driver and it works, when the thing was working before cable access was hooked up, in modem properties, it said it was a rockwell 56k pci data fax modem.

in sys properties/device mngr/ their used to be 2 modem icons. the one listed above and one was a rockwell hcf modem.

the only thing I can think of as to why these drivers wont work this time around is that my bios got changed by the install wizard on the hdd disk.

I also noticed that on the initial boot up on the new hdd, that in sys properties where it says what os you have loaded, it said win 98se/nt5.0.

it also changed desk top apearance on boot up and if you went to start/run and typed in msconfig, it said it was an invalid path or filename. once again,win98se/ configsys, have used it a gazillion times no problems.

I have just formated the hdd again. loaded win98se and the ati vid drvr. I will leave it as it stands for now with the hope one of you kind souls can and will shed some light on what I am doing wrong.

all the info for this machine is in the link i posted. any help would be a wonderfull thing, thanks for your time, ward.

Ammok · 07-13-2002, 07:28 PM

Don't buy OEm if you want to upgrade, you have just found out the hard way that their all cwap. They use a specif "riser" connector that nobody else uses, it allows them to cram the cheapest amount of garbage onto one card and all is well if all you do is surf. Same goes for Packard Bell etc but not Dell.

Now your problem is that the recovery disk HP have flogged you cannot cope with the new drive. So you really do need to start from scratch.

Additional problem, they can have their own bios version. However, you may be able to disable the HP logo from bios.

Try to identify all your devices and download drivers from the net if you cannot access them from the HP disks. Once you think you got them all, most, save them to floppy and begin a complete new install with win98, and drivers it can't find or shows as conflicts, hopefully yopu may be able to resolve with the floppies.

If you already have acheived this, then you won't ever get the HP disks to work, you have supreceded them with your own install.

Hope this helps.

jray · 07-13-2002, 10:56 PM

Your easy install disk (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't change your bios; it is just an overlay to allow an older bios to see a larger drive, if necassary.

As for your driver problems, are your HP disks (or disk) a complete system restore, or drivers only? If it is the full restore, you should see the HP screen at startup; (it could be disabled in your bios.)

Running a full restore should setup all your hardware, and if it came with 95b or higher, the upgrade to 98 should have you up and running again. But if the restore disk is 95a, you'd need to set up a fat partition of 2 gigs, (not fat32) which is the max size it can see, run the restore, then the 98 upgrade.

At that point you'd have a couple of options. You could create a fat32 partition on the rest of the drive (C:=2g, D=38g), or use a 3rd party program like partition magic to convert your fat partition to fat32 (much faster than 98's converter), and expand the partition from 2g to the full 40g. I've done the latter many times, a bit time consuming but it works well.

wardD · 07-14-2002, 03:01 AM

hi all thanks for the replies.

unfortunatley we did not receive any soft ware what so ever when we purchased our computers. no windows disk, no restore disk, nada. I even went back to future shop where we purchased both computers and asked what was up with that(no disks) and they told me I had purchased them as is off the shelf. and since they didnt have the "disks" that is why we got such a good price on them!

all in all it was an exspensive lesson. I have formated my 6740 queit a few times and have managed to keep it running by finding its drivers off the internet. it sucks that we dont have the programs that came with the computers but as I said it was a learning situation.

I will keep plunking away tring to figure out what drivers makes the wifes machine run. worst comes to worst i will take it to a computer shop and have them get it going for me and get a copy of the drivers at the same time.

thanks again, ward!