Bought HP dv6282ea with Vista, and successfully downgraded to XP

hello,

i've recently purchased a HP dv6282ea laptop that came with windows vista.
because of various reasons i wanted to remove vista,re-partition my hard disk and install XP.
what seemed to be a straight-forward process became hell, and after a bit of struggle i've managed to get over it and make this hell a bit colder.
because i haven't found similar guides on the net, i've decided to post this message on the first forum google found regarding this topic.

so this is what i did in order to get XP working on my vista laptop:

first, i had to disable built-in SCSI support on my bios, or else the XP installer wouldn't recognize my hard disk.

then, after XP was installed, i realized HP won't give any useful drivers for windows XP for my specific model. i've installed some HP hotkey and wireless monitor utilities for my model but that didn't help much, because windows did not recognize my wireless nor ethernet controllers at all (and without internet, there's no life, nor audio or graphics drivers).

after being sad for a few hours, i've decided to try older HP models that came originally with XP instead of vista, because the actual hardware on the laptop is probably the same or has backward compatibility with these older models.
so i've downloaded some drivers for dv6100ea and dv6150ea. some worked and some did not.

after playing around with these drivers, i've managed to get audio, video (using hp drivers, not ones from nvidia), bluetooth, wireless and ethernet (intel 1000 driver, not 100) working. my system was usable and i was happy and thrilled.

as for the pavilion camera, the xp driver installed correctly, but did not manage to actually show anything with the camera. because i like cameras, i've decided to try vista drivers for it, even while i'm using xp. for my surprise the drivers install correctly and the camera was set up and working. odd - but it works.

to summarize things up, you can probably locate all missing drivers for this hp laptop model, and probably other models also, on the www.hp.com site. just don't confine your search to your specific model and ignore the big-red-"YOUR MODEL MIGHT BE DIFFERENT!!!" messages.

i hope someone will find this post useful.

bye

 

Here's the list of the drivers I used from HP.

graphics:
sp34044 nvidia geforce

network:
sp34489 wireless
sp33574 intel 1000 ethernet

audio:
sp33566 micrsoft uaa (should be installed before installing xp audio drivers)
sp34204 audio xp

for those who are bored easily:
sp33258 hp quickkeys
sp34510 wireless assistant
sp34746 pavilion camera vista

more stuff:
sp32883 bluetooth (not sure, but i think it works)
sp33604 5-in-1 (didn't check)

 

with ur successful XP install, do you have a problem of the fan running constantly? did u have this problem with vista in the first place? any whining noise?

 

Manowar3,

Are you still around? I have a DV9207. I want downgrade to XP. I have a couple of questions.

How do you disable the SCSI thing?

What do think would the XP equivalent to the DV9207?

Anybody else want to help, please chime in. Thank you.

 

davidt1:

1) To disable the SCSI support, you need to access the BIOS menus. To do so, restart your laptop, on the very first screen (the one with the HP logo before the Windows screen) there should be instructions like press F# key for boot order, press F# key for BIOS menu (# for a specific number). I think the key for BIOS is F10 but I'm not sure. Press that as quickly as you can before the screen fades or else you'll need to shutdown and boot again. That should take you into the BIOS menu. Root around in the menus for SCSI and follow the instructions on screen to disable it. (See note)

2). The XP equivalent to DV92XX is the DV90XX. It's the same convention for all HP DV series: DVX0XX for XP and DVX2XX for Vista.

Note: I'm not sure if manowar3 erred in specifying SCSI since I've never heard of any current HP DV series laptop using SCSI hard drives. I think a big reason for that is SCSI is expensive. Instead, I'm reasonably sure that the problem manowar3 had was with the lack of SATA support by XP. This problem is detailed in the NBR guide for XP installation on Vista laptops. I also know that the disable SATA option is available in the BIOS. If my suspicions are correct, then you need to first disable SATA support for XP to detect your hard drive, then install XP, then install the correct SATA drivers from within windows, then finally re-enable SATA support from the BIOS. Again, I don't know the exact circumstances of manowar3's problem so this is only my suspicion. Perhaps he can either deny this or confirm it.

 

Hello,
I did not encounter any fan problems. It goes on and off whenever it wants to, so I believe the CPU does know when it's too hot inside.

As for SCSI support, I did have to disable BIOS SCSI support in order for the XP installation to detect my disk (as SBR mentioned). I didn't play around with that option anymore, so it's still disabled in my BIOS.
As for SATA support in XP, I didn't really do anything special, it just worked after the XP installation.

I wonder how painful would it be to install linux on this machine.

 

Hey guys, same thing happened to me, but I have the HP Pavilion dv9207 us. XP wouldn't detect my HD so I tried manowar's idea but there is nothing about SCSI in the BIOS.

I hit F8.
BIOS DOES have something about SATA you can disable and the message says, "May need to disable for legacy OS like 2000 or NT." Well, apparently XP is now a legacy OS.

I disabled it, saved changes, and rebooted. HD detected.

I am currently installing XP and will see if I need to go get the SATA drivers or something. I'll update if anyone cares - I see this thread is months old but if I was looking for it, maybe someone else will benefit.

 

XP is based on windows NT, it's not legacy yet

So far I've installed Ubuntu-Linux on my dv6282ea and I use it as my main work and internet OS. Sound and accelerated video graphics, as well as wireless network and bluetooth (needs some reading though) were working out of the box. The microphone did not work but I managed to get it working with some help from the ubuntu forums, it's still kinda weird though. I've also managed to get the webcam working, but it's still doing some problems for me.

To summarize:
Working good

• Graphics (incl. dual monitor and TV)
• Sound playback
• Wireless+Bluetooth
• CD/DVD burning
• USB Keyboard/mouse (in case someone inquires)
• Little infrared remote thing (it's same as pressing the hotkeys above the
  keyboard)
• Sound goes off from built-in speakers when plugging external headphones/speakers
• Memory cards slot

Working sortof

• Webcam (working with Skype as V4L2, but the module is still in development so it has some brightness issues)
• Built-in mic

Never checked

• Expansion slot