Clean Install on my new Radiance Envy 14

Hi, guys. Just received my Envy 14. I don't notice any problem at the moment. I will check more tonight. Everything works.

A question, I plan to do a clean install with a Seagate Momentus XT. But I never do it before. When we change hard drive, all the data we had before are saved on the old one, right? And when we change the hard drive, how could we install windows 7?
Do we just have to insert the windows 7 install disc when booting the laptop, and then following instructions to continue installation?
Once we install, do we have to install all drivers to make the laptop working? Which drivers should I install? Could I find them on HP siteweb?

Also, the preinstalled Adobe photoshop and premier will be removed too. Where can I re download them again?

Thank you for letting me know.

 

From other threads here, I've learned that all the drivers are on teh C:\SwSetup. Save that to an external hard drive so you can have it once you install the new HD/SSD if you install a new one that is, and after Windows install.

That's a good question. I am not sure if Windows is included in the SwSetup folder. Maybe those who have done clean installs can explain further.

KJ

 

If you make your recovery disks, you can use that to re-image your new drive to be exactly as how HP installed Win7.

 

To do a clean install off of a Windows disk, put the disc in, hit "esc" when you boot up and choose "DVD" or "optical drive" as your boot device, it should install from there. As for drivers, windows will have a few of them, the major missing one is Wifi, which you can either get from hp.com or just plug in ethernet and let windows find your missing drivers for you. The remaining missing ones (namely the display driver for the 5650, are on hp.com).

But it doesn't seem like you have much experience with clean installs, so i highly recommend doing what someone else suggested and creating boot discs (look in the first post in the envy 14 owners lounge pt 2). And just using those to format your new HDD. Much less headache.

 

ok, thank you for all your replys. is there someone else who has already done a clean install on his envy 14 ? Thank you

 

Hey kyoka, I got my envy 14 and it got pretty messed up on first boot... so I will be attempting a clean install when I receive the recovery disks that HP is supposed to be sending me.

 

crashed on 1st boot ?

even the recovery partition failed ?

 

I see that I have a recovery disk with 27 gb in Computer. I think that we have all the factory installation files inside. Does that mean that even I change my Hard drive, I still can do a recovery thanks to this recovery disk section?

 

Yeah, even the recovery partition Whenever I tried to open the recovery manager in the bios it would just load to a blue abstract image and sit there, so something got screwed up during the first boot..

 

I just did. The biggest obstacles were the wifi driver, because I didn't have a cat5 cable around to use but I just downloaded it on another computer and moved it over to the Envy.

Everything else was smooth, Windows 7 is great at finding drivers.

 

When you remove your old hdd, is the recovery partition included in the HDD? Or this section is separated from the hdd so that we can make factory recovery even we change hard drive?

Also How did you do with adobe element photoshop and premier? Because HP doesn't include any software cd in their package.

 

the recovery partition is on the HDD, so if you take it out you lose the ability to recover your system.

Only way to keep it is to clone the HDD onto the SSD before you install the SSD.

 

What lammah said. Also, I didn't need elements, so I lost that.

 

Just did my clean install. W7 is pretty beast with drivers, and the only one I absolutely had to install before I could get anything done was the WLAN driver. From there, you can get on the internet and download the rest of the drivers straight onto the ENVY.

 

Isn't it though?

Pro tip: Once you install all the graphics drivers off of Windows update and HP's site, you can easily upgrade to the newest catalyst from AMD's site (11.1, I believe), it included some drivers that made my HDMI sound stop lagging.