"Quickplay: One man's experience", also Quickplay on DV6500t with XP

Everyone,

So, for the last week I have been trying in vain to get Quickplay Direct onto my brand new dv6500t (CTO Core 2 Duo w/Santa Rosa chipset). Alas, I believe I have run into the perverbial brick wall.

A little history:

QuickPlay is HPs home-grown media player. This was groundbreaking when it first arrived as it allowed users to play their DVDs and Music straight from buttons on the laptop chassis without booting Windows. Quickplay is broken into two pieces. Quickplay for Windows, and Quickplay Direct. Quickplay Direct is the version of the software that boots into its own OS from a seperate partition on your hard drive. In initial versions of QPD, this OS was a Linux derivitive. But, as of QPD2.0 and later, HPs software vendor switched to MS Windows Embedded. Quickplay for Window (QPW) is just that, a version of the software that runs within windows XP. This loads like any other media player application.

The newest HP Pavilion Laptops coming from HP with MS Windows Vista installed are hobbled in their implementation of QPD. Instead of loading the seperate MS Windows Embedded, the quickplay buttons above the laptop keyboard just act like the power button and boot up Vista and then start QPW once Vista is booted up. This is obviously not ideal for those that want to get to their music fast and without all the pretense of the entire OS.

So, for those that are industrious enough to tackle the inner workings of your computer. You can repartition your drives and do a clean XP install. That is exactly what I did... and using a number of good guides that are referenced on this board... I was quickly up and running with a clean XP install and all drivers loaded.

Now, on to installing QPD. Again, there are a number of good references on this... including this very forum. But, I did find one that seems like a treasure trove of all things quickplay: http://www.notebookforums.com/thread141817.html.
There are a myriad of things you must do, including creating a second primary partition at the end of your drive. Not to mention obtaining the QPD software. Since those with Vista installed at the factory do not have the QPD software in their SWSetup folder, they have to relay on finding it off the web. A good resource for that turns out to be this web site: http://www.asifism.com. Don't worry... he seems to update the keys every once in a while.

And now, the fun part... I have the software installed... a brand new partition containing MS Windows Embedded... and I must reboot to finish. OH NO: ***STOP: 0x0000007B ... ...

Now what! Well... here's the perverbial wall. As some have mentioned on other posts... the lastest HP notebooks do not have a way to turn on native support for SATA drives via the BIOS. The XP Installation threads contain details on this, but basically in order to install XP... you have to slipstream the SATA drivers into the XP Install CD using a program called nLite.

Well.... The blue screen error 0x0000007B is detailed here on MS's website: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/324103. Basically.... I think MS Windows embedded is running into the same problem that the XP installation CD does.... there is no native support for the SATA drive on the dv6500 laptop. So, when the OS attempts to boot... it craps out on actually reading the disk and thinks there's no hard disk (referred to around the board as getting a BSOD).

So, I'm looking to you tech people with more experience on XP and driver level implementation. Supposedly XP startup has some initial driver load during its boot process... the idea is that it loads the basic drivers to get the OS boot process started (hard disks, etc.)... and then the rest continues until you're at the login screen. My best guess is that XP embedded is exactly the same, and requires the dv6500 Intel SATA chipset drivers to be installed (much like they must be slipstreamed into the XP Install CD).

I can gain access to the partition containing the embedded OS to edit files or place new files on it. But, I need help on what to do to install the drivers into the XP Embedded OS so that it uses them on startup and can boot off the drive! This is not a drive partition or MBR issue as the boot process gets far enough down the line to get to the XP Startup screen (the one with the logo and the "working" bar at the bottom). Its at that point you get the blue screen.

Anyway... hope someone can help... or at least keeps anyone else with a dv6500t from killing themselves to get it installed when I don't think it will work without further investigation!

Thanks!

 

oh wow, thanks for creating this thread and letting me know. i was about to try and install QPD on my dv9500t.... ill see if there is a way to slipstream drivers for Windows Embedded

 

mujjuman, you successfully got XP installed and running on your dv9500t, though (which is what rodney23 is still struggling with, if I read him correctly) -- he hasn't even had a CHANCE TO TRY installing the QPD yet, I don't think...

So my guess is if ANYONE can help him solve his issue, it might be you, although I'm also guessing he may have to start over from square one to get it done right, but maybe not (that's just usually the way I do things, to make sure I don't end up with something "scrambled," lol).

Good luck to ya, Rodney... I wasn't even AWARE of Quickplay before now... seen lots of folks talk about it on the forum, but this is the first time I've actually read a description of what it does, and NOW I can understand one good reason why some folks WOULD want to take their laptops back to XP, since if they use them a lot as DVD and/or music players, doing that WITHOUT having to always boot Windows first is a MAJOR convenience feature... I likely won't use mine for that purpose all that much when I don't already have it on for other reasons, so it still won't be an issue for me, at present... HOWEVER if I add a second internal drive at some point, it's likely it'll be formatted for XP, just so I can have dual-boot (I recently read on on of these threads that HP will charge me like $50 just for the HARDWARE to add a new hard drive, but as my laptop is in mid-build stage, I don't guess it's worth the trouble to change the order, and I already got a great deal on one of those USB-powered tiny external backup drives).

Help Rodney here out, mujjuman!
Jeff

 

JeffAHayes: Jeff, I actually have Windows XP installed just fine on the laptop. As mujjman correctly deduced (guess I wasn't 100% clear), Quickplay Direct (QPD) is installed as it's own OS... running Windows Embedded (a derivative of XP) on its own drive partition. For those of us with the latest HP laptops and no way to turn on Native mode for our SATA drives through the BIOS (HP removed the feature in the latest BIOS releases), the OS must handle driver loads during its initial load to read the SATA disks. As I stated... this is what I believe is the problem when it goes to load the Windows Embedded OS and the cause for the STOP error. I've installed a couple times... always the same result no matter what I change (drive parition sizes, location, etc.).

mujjman: Here's a question... can we use our slipstreamed XP OS Install CD to load the driver... and then boot the Embedded partition the rest of the way? This would prove out the concept that its not having the drivers thats causing the issue since the drivers are already loaded when you use the CD to boot from? Not sure how you'd continue to load the full OS after you cancel the install though?

 

Ahhh, I see, Rodney, it's the Windows Embedded that's giving you fits...

Well HP, being the TRUE CONTROL FREAKS THEY ARE, is probably doing all it can from a firmware perspective to keep its hardware restricted to its originally shipped parameter... so the MORE YOU CAN DO TO OUTWIT THEM, the more power to ya!
Jeff