Moving a 1TB mechanical HD (C:) from a Z420 to a Z640

[stanrosenblatt1]

I  just purchased a Z640 E5-2650 V4 with a 512GB SSD boot drive. I am retiring my much loved Z420 E5-2680 as the power supply fan bearings are failing (no shame here for a 11 or 12 yr.old machine).  I purchased a Z640 E5-2650 V4 with a 512GB SSD and AMD FirePRO 2100 GA as my new workhorse.  (I initially gave NO thought to the new machine being loaded with Windows 11).  I didn';t even get as far as transferring a single file when I discovered after connecting an HP 22uh monitor via a displayport to HDMI adapter, that on first boot up of the Z640 I had no video (except for the built-in HP background art) and no Windows 3-tone audio USB connection/disconnection ack. from connecting my Logitech USB KB-mouse dongle.  HMMM!  It appears that HP does NOT support Win 11 on ANY of the Z X40 series desktops.  I am trying to decide am I  better off moving my C: drive (WD 1TB mech drive) from the Z420 to the Z640 and stay at Win 10 or do I attempt to fix the video and audio issues via several driver/graphic card / other changes, knowing that Win 11 will STILL not be supported on the machine in hopes of making use of the nice SSD which is currently the boot drive in the Z640.  While I realize that eventually I will have to upgrade to Win 11, I'm thinking that future releases of Win 11 may have fixes for the apparently many HDMI video and audio glitches as well as many other problems of varying degrees of reliability.  I invest in the HP Z workstations for their general reliability.  I am not a gamer at all and my use of the PC is very general skewed towards web-surfing, light document/spreadsheet creation and moderate photo slide-show creartion/editing.  I welcome all experienced based suggestions 

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

For W11, the only suggestion I can offer, would be to install the latest W10 driver for the AMD graphics adapter from the AMD website if you have not done so already.

FirePro™ W2100 Drivers & Support | AMD

Also install the latest W10 Realtek audio driver.

Driver - HP Z640 Workstation | HP® Customer Support

Since you bought the PC used, it is possible that the previous owner disabled the USB connection/disconnection audio sound.

Check to make sure the option is enabled.

Right click on the volume icon on the right side of the taskbar and select Sounds

Then scroll down and make sure the following options are enabled:

Device Connect
Device Disconnect

The default sound for those settings are:

Windows Hardware Insert

Windows Hardware Remove

If that doesn't help, you can reinstall W10 on the 512 GB SSD by making a bootable USB recovery drive with the cloud recovery client utility that will reinstall W10, the drivers and the software that originally came with the PC.

Driver - HP Z640 Workstation | HP® Customer Support

Here is an info link for how to use the utility:

HP Business PCs - Using the HP Cloud Recovery Client in Windows 11 and Windows 10 | HP® Customer Sup...

[stanrosenblatt1]

Paul:

THX,...ALL good suggestions. First, I need to get some basic video going successfully,  then USB mouse,  & KB working, then I will immediately try your suggestions.  I'm waiting on arrival of Displayport to DVI cable to see if that will enable video (incase the video problem is HDMI exclusively.  Does that make any sense? I was given an HP DVD called Driver Recovery DVD when I purchased the PC.  Would that perhaps be the Win 10 drivers and can I assume that it is used in a recovery boot process? In your opinion would there be any benefit to ignoiring the HP DVD and going straight to the USB Win 10 {_+ drivers recovery disk? (The copyright date of the HP Driver Recovery disk is 2018) B-t-w, is it just me or does AMD seem to have a bit more struggles getting their drivers right on first pass than NVidia?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

If you have to go back to W10, I would use the cloud recovery client utility.

The instruction link I posted tells you how to install the drivers via the cloud recovery tool.

Yes, I suppose that you don't have much to lose by buying a display port to DVI cable to rule out problems with the HDMI.

Yes, I agree that I have had issues trying to update the AMD graphics drivers where I have never had a problem with the Nvidia ones.

The Nvidia drivers are updated more frequently as well.

I also note that AMD quits updating their graphics card drivers much sooner for their graphics cards than Nvidia does.