Need help with an HP desktop

N

NotNew2this

New Member
Hello. I was asked my a friend to install Windows 7 on his HP M8200N desktop. He has only had this desktop for about 6-10 months and barely uses it.

I have installed Windows 7 on various other machines with total success, but never an HP.

I reformat his entire drive (using the Windows 7 interface) and begin the install. Everything seems to be going fine. Then I get some message about how something couldn't be configured and then the entire display changed to small blue and green squares. I shut down the machine and re-start it. It boots up to a screen that tells me to revert back to before a recent hardware or software change was made and then continue.

I try the install again and notice that two partitions are still listed (one is only 100MB). So I leave the partitions alone and just install in the bigger one, same problem occurs.

I tried to install Vista also just to get the machine back up and running and it did the same thing. The machine came with Vista Home Premium (FYI). The computer is now useless with no operating system.

My question is: Does HP do something to all of their computers so you cant install Windows on them? Do they only want you to use the recovery disks and not a standard Windowsdisk? How can they prevent my installation?

Do I need to buy a new blank hard drive and use that? I dont have any recovery disks for the desktop and I dont think I should HAVE to use any.

P.S. The same day I did his 6 year old HP laptop and it also took a huge dump. I had to install XP using the recovery disks to get that machine back in action.

Looking for some knowledge here. I am 99.99% sure this is some weird HP thing.

Thanks
-Bobby
 
From what I can tell it has a X2 6000 with a Nvidia 6150 chipset, since the screen goes into blue and green squares after the error it would seem video related. But I would not think Vista or 7 would have a problem with a 6150 onboard. It has a card reader and a TV card installed, might have a problem with one of those, unhook them and see what happens.
 
I recently installed Windows 7 on my X2 5000+ using only the onboard GeForce 6100 graphics and it works great, Aero included. Before that I had Vista Ultimate on it without issue.

It sounds to me like the install disc may be corrupt since it bricked two machines in the same manner.
 
Thanks everyone for the ideas. I doubt that I will remove any components from the desktop (for now). The laptop is running 100% on XP now and will stay that way until it dies. Kudos to HP for making a laptop that lasts over 6 years with no serious software issues and no hardware failures.

Some thoughts: I tried installing both Vista Ultimate and 7 Ultimate on the desktop with the same results. Tomorrow I am going to try the whole process again with a different install disk. (and no peripherals attached)

FYI I was using different copies of the install disk for the laptop and the desktop, but all of then were burned on my laptop (same as the other successful installs)

I'm just glad that no one confirmed my fear of HP having some evil control over its computers.

Thanks to all once again
 
You can chat with HP here > (using Internet Explorer) Just to fully confirm that there isn't some patch or Bios Update or something to do first
 
I tried installing Windows 7 again this morning with nothing else connected to the computer (no speakers, no wireless keyboard/mouse) and everything went 100%.

I am up and running with no issues.

I am still confident that the laptop is too old (wrong hardware config) for Windows 7.

Thanks to all for your help
 
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