Finally, after a week of struggling with various roadblocks, last night I succeeded (sort of) in setting up my new computer with XP Pro. I bought an HP Pavilion a530n, which has an Athlon 64 3200+ (2ghz), 512 GB RAM (soon to be upgraded, when convenient), 200 gb hard drive, DVD Writer, and NVidia GeForce AGP 8X with 128Mb DDR memory.

My now “old” Emachines Pentium 4 1.5ghz with 768 mb RAM and an add-on HP 1X DVD Writer and CDR went to Brian. His still older IBM Aptiva P2 400 was having problems, starting with the powersupply. His ATI All-in-Wonder now is in the emachines box (it’s also his room TV), so I took out the AGP card (also an NVidia) and put in his PCI All-in-Wonder Card. The 160gb Western Digitial I got in early February came back out and into my new HP box. The second hard drive, and 80gb Maxtor, became the new Boot Drive. I had to reinstall XP home on that drive, so before I took out the 160gb drive which booted XP Pro, I copied the contents of the 80gb drive to my new box over the home network.

When that was done, which was a pain because the CDR on which I had copied the XP Home files (which I had to do in order to have a way to install XP Home regularly instead of having to use the stupid method EMachines (and now most other manufacturers) has of giving you one re-install option: Wipe the hard drive and restore it to factory setup. I wrote the Windows License key from the back of the Emachines box on the CD case, to use that license (I copied the XP Home disk from somebody else, but didn’t make it bootable). Anyway, when I tried to use that CD to boot from, it didn’t. So I had to use a boot floppy, which wouldn’t let me access the i386 directory from the command prompt. A simple cd i386 responded with “Invalid directory”, and I saw the darn thing on the dir listing. So, next I downloaded the XP Boot Floppies archive from the Net and made XP Home Install disks. That started OK, then the disk #3 was bad…..no chance to make another and continue, I had to abort the install and start over. Same deal with Disk 4, and Disk 6 (just before completion….I had tried to use the newest looking floppies I had). I finally got through it. The XP install copied the installation files from the CD, and restarted. The reboot brought this wonderful news: Error Loading Operating System.

After repeating this floppy booted install 3 times with the same result, I found a win98 startup disk and ran fdisk. Then , success. XP Home loaded. Now, back to the new box. My plan: Install the former boot drive (The WD 160 gb) to the new box as a slave drive to the 200gb drive, and then upgrade the XP Home installed by HP to my XP Pro, now removed from the Emachines box.

Pain number 2: The install/upgrade, which I had run from within XP Home a cojple of occassions before on the EMachines box, errored out after the first reboot with a blue screen and a STOP error. A couple of calls to HP support gave me the suggestions to uninstall NAV (I had disabled AutoProtect but not unistalled), and perform a “Clean Boot” (they gave me a link to a MS KNowledge base article). About 3 attempts at this, stilll blue scrren. Another try with the second hard drive back out again, no luck. Another try after a “System Restore” using HP’s restore partition. No luck. (Later, late last night, I realized what I did not not realize then: I wiped out the copy of the second hard drive I had copied to this new box when I was preparing the Emachines box to use that drive as the new boot drive. On that drive were my super large Outlook mail files and 3 or 4 archive files. Doh! I realized it last night when I was installing Office Pro 2003 and was logging into my email account.

Oh well. More fun to come. I decided to wipe the C drive (and my mail files along with everything else there, 40 gb worth and who knows what…old stuff mostly…but I wish I had thought of it and combed through it) and install XP Pro from scratch. It all went through, but I noticed that the install didn’t detect the network, and said it would figure that out later. That was a hint of what was to come. When XP Pro loaded for the first time, ready for use, I couldn’t get on the net. It asked me to create a new connection. A look at the Device Manager in Control Panel revealed that several things were not detected, number one in the “Other Devices (the unrecognized things)”: Ethernet Controller. Also: Multimedia Audio Controller, SM Bus Controller, Universal Serial Bus Controller, and Video Controller (VGA Compatible). So I had a Standard VGA, no sound, no network, and no USB. Cool.

I had no idea what HP had on its motherboard. The manual is of almost no use. NO info at all on WHAT ethernet adapter it is, WHAT sound system, WHAT video. The stickers onthe front tell me that the Video is NVidia’s GForce FX5200XT. But without a network connection to download it with, that’s not much help. A call to the HP support again enebaled me to coax info out of the support person about these mystery motherboard components; like, “What the hell are they?” He told me the Network card was a Realtek RTL 8201L, and the sound was AC-97 Realtek. He also said (and this was turned out to be the most useful info) that the motherboard had the NVidia NForce3 chipset.

I decided to try to find the Realtek Ethernet adapter drivers. Realtek had no such drivers on their site that I could find, and the one link I found that specified it was an 8201 did not work (the driver install did not recognize the files as install files). I stayed up until 12:45 am Thursday night to find all this out. Friday morning a Google search revealed an article of how somebody found the missing drivers (on the C drive under hp/drivers). I decided I would go by Circuit City on my way home, copy that directory from their display model, and I’d be on my way. No directory like that existed. So I bought a 5 pack of CDRs and made a “HP Recovery disk” from the HP tools on that machine, and surfed around for drivers on one of their Net connected machines, and downloaded an AC97 audio driver, and some drivers from the nVidia site, one of which was NVIDIAWindows2000XPnForceDrivers.exe, an archive which , upon install, found my network Card! I had seen on the Circuit City floor model of my machine that the Network Card showed up an nVidia nForce MCP Networking controller. That was it. The aduio drivers also installed, and I was all set up save for the USB. INstalling XP SP1 fixed a couple of those (once I got on the net with my now actibe network card), but I sttill had one “Other Device” showing up as UNiversal Serial Bus (USB) Controller, but I also had an entire section under the same name (Universal Serial Bus Controllers). When my Pocket PC wouldn’t sync up under ActiveSync, I tried uninstalling the “Other Device” USB Controller, and when I did, “Wallah!”, the system immediately recognized a new “USB Root Hub” and the Pocket PC was recognized. No more yellow errors in Device Mgr!