HP Pavilion 6095ea XP Re-install

Hello everyone,

Just a quick checklist before I install XP Pro on my laptop, XP Home is useless to me and plus I want a clean base to work from...

Obviously, the laptop has 3 partitions: XP, Quickplay and Recovery.

My plan is to leave QP and Recovery intact seeing as it's a 100GB HD, 85GB on XP is more than enough for me at the moment...

So far I've:

> Burned 2 Recovery DVD-Rs via Recovery Disc Creator
> Burned a DVD-R with the SWSetup and I386 folder
> Burned a legal copy of XP Pro w/SP2
> Backed up my personal stuff

Anything else left to do thats important?!

Also, I take it I need to disable the SATA from BIOS before installing XP right...

P.S. SWSetup has all the drivers/software i.e. SonicPlus that I need right, everything that's installed at the moment, HP put everything in this folder right? Because I don't want to miss anything and don't want any ? in Device Manager!

P.S.S. What's the difference between the Recovery partition and the Recovery discs I've burned?

So, some guidance before I go ahead...

Thanks in advance!

 

There is no difference between the recovery partition and the recovery disks that you have created from that partition.

Check the Swsetup folder for the SATA drivers. Unfortunately I could not find those on Hp's drivers page so you want to be sure that you have them.

If everything else is backed up, you are ready to go. I suggest you create an image of your hard drive after the install. Thus you will be able to restore it quickly and painlessly next time you want a clean install.

 

Why keep the recovery partition? If you reinstall XP, then you probably wont be able to access it. Since you have burnt the discs, there is no point in letting the recovery partition take up 10GB.

Yes, the SWSetup contains all the software and drivers to get the laptop back to full working condition without any ? in device manager. Some of the drivers are also available on HP's support site. If you have the webcam, I dont believe the drivers are located on the SWSetup folder, but should be available online.

This step might not be necessary.

They are the same, the recover discs are ofcourse on separate discs and they can restore the system back to factory state. This includes the restore partition and the QP partition.

 

Right, in that case, I'm gonna go for it right now... Thanks again!

P.S. Think I won't keep the Recovery partition.

 

OK, so I pressed F10 at boot-time and went into BIOS, there don't seem to be any options regarding "turning off SATA support"... Help!

P.S. Should I just go ahead with XP setup and see if it recognises the drive and if it does, does that mean everything will be OK?

AAAAHHHH!

 

Hm, I suspected that because I didn't find SATA drivers in HP's page. If I were you I would continue but if you want to be sure wait for someone with Turion system to come and comment.

 

You should be fine. The SATA issue seems to be related to Intel drivers and so the issue might only be on systems whic use Intel chipsets. I would say go ahead and try since you already have the restore disc in any event those should be capable of getting you back to factory state.

 

Uh, OK, big problem... I re-installed and am at moment in the process of right clicking on stuff in device manager and telling it to search for the driver off my SWSetup DVD and there are two things which don't seem to be able to find any drivers... PCI Device and Unknown Device...

I'm kinda worried about this at the moment.

 

Is your card reader installed? What about the webcam?
See here and check what it is that you are missing.

 

The 'Unknown device' most probably relates to the Quicklaunch buttons. Install the QLB software and it should install the necessary software.

 

OK the "unknown device" was actually QuickLaunch buttons and the other one was the audio so everything was OK...

But funny thing, I was going through the SWSetup DVD picking things to install and installed the HP QuickPlay Direct stuff, it was installing to X: drive, which I momentarily saw in My Computer... So just to make sure, I re-launched the XP Pro Setup CD for the partition section, there was no X: visible... Just C: and E: for QuickPlay... I also noticed that the maximum HD space is close to 96GB, does that mean the BIOS takes 4GB or are all computer HDs like this?

P.S. I've now wiped everything and let XP install to one big massive space, does that mean re-running the QuickPlay Direct setup, it will auto-partition?