HP Vectra VL800 More questions

[kenner]

Although I have concluded that this pc will never make it to the "working pc" stage, I would at least like to learn something in the process. I borrowed two hard drives from normal clone pc's to use for testing. One has WIN98SE on it and the other WIN PRO200. Going into setup each time, BIOS sees the hard drive I have installed. On the WIN98 boot up, I get this message Invalid system Disk. On the WIN2000 Pro bootup, the message is No Operating System found. If you choose A: as the first boot device for WiN98, the drive is visible and OS is shown in directory. I have attempted to make the cdrom the first boot device but that doesnt work with either hard drive; error message is then the same; Invalid System Disk. Does HP have their systems so locked up that only a HP restore cd will repair them or is there a pc lesson in this?

[mjc]

Actually, an HP system is set up in such a way, that if, on some machines, the hard drive is replaced you can't use the restore CD...but on most of them it is a BIOS code that locks the restore CD.

There is usually no problem putting another OS on an HP...in fact I ran Linux on a Pavilion for years, then wiped the drive and used the restore disk to put it back to what came on it.

It looks to me that you are having a problem with the IDE controller...I would look carefully at all the capacitors on the the motherboard.

[kenner]

The MBD looks very clean, no sign of a problem there. It actually did boot up, just once with the WIN2000 hard drive but only that one time. I will probably just have to give up on it but would like to know the why of it.

[mjc]

I would say there is a very good chance that the onboard IDE controller is the problem...at this point is it worth it trying to test it more?

If so, you can check the drives in other machines to make sure that they aren't the problem and then if you have access to an IDE controller card to try you can then try them back in that machine...

[kenner]

As a retiree/volunteer, it's always worth it, just for the learning process if nothing else :-) The drives are good, working pulls from other pc's. I thought about the controller card and we do have one but it is an old one which requires windows to be installed. Just for something to do, I took a new hard drive, and a XP install cd to see what would happen. It boots to the cd, loads everything just fine until I get to the product code. No matter how many times I enter the code, I get an error about an invalid code. The package was sealed so I know the code is good. I think I am pretty close to pulling the cpu and memory and trying to sell those. Something is very, very odd with this motherboard.