HP Media Center PC (M370N)

[dborbs]

Hello,

I recently had to remove the Maxtor hard drive that came with this system because it was giving me trouble. I replaced it with a 500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue.

Unfortunately, I could not locate the recovery discs that came with this system, so I decided to install the only OS I had on hand (Windows 2000). I went through the 4-diskette floppy diskette stage, formatted the drive for NTFS using the installation CD, then when the PC restarted, it got stuck at the HP boot screen. It won't let me finish the install.

Could someone please give me a little guidance?

Thanks.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

You don't need the diskettes to load W2000.

Turn the PC on. Insert the W2000 installation disk in the CD-ROM drive

Restart the PC. At the HP splash screen tap the F9 key until you get a boot options menu.

Select to Boot off the CD-ROM drive.

The Windows 2000 disk should boot, and will examine your PC, and then give you options and you can select to install W2000. If you only have one partition you can install W2000 over it or you can delete it and let W2000 create a new one. Once that is done, Select the Format PC with the NTFS file system and that will take some time. Once that is done, Windows will automatically begin copying the installation files from the CD and you just sit back and wait until it asks you for more input during the installation process.  The computer should not restart after you partition or format the HDD using the automatic Windows 2000 installation.

You only use the diskettes for an ancient computer where you can't boot off the CD-Rom drive.

If you live in the USA and you don't mind parting with $27.00, you can still get a set of recovery disks from this 3rd party vendor. They are no longer available directly from HP.

http://www.computersurgeons.com/productdetails.aspx?ID=4251

Paul

[dborbs]

That's the thing. The drive formats and the CD installs files. However, at some point in the installation, the CD requires the PC to be restarted and when that happens, I cannot continue setup because it just hangs at the HP boot screen. It's almost like the computer "forgets" what it was doing when it gets restarted.

[Paul_Tikkanen · Accepted solution]

Hi:

I don't know what the problem could be then unfortunately.

Sounds like a hardware issue or something. 

Yes, the PC will restart at a couple points during the installation process and installation should continue automatically.

I would be afraid to order recovery disks because I think they would do the same thing.

Paul

[dborbs]

Paul, 

Is it possible that the BIOS is not cooperating with the installation because it detects that it is not the original OS (XP Media Center 2004)? Have you ever heard of that?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

No, I doubt that would be the issue. You can install any OS on almost any PC. They may not run as expected but they would load. Your PC should be able to run Windows 2000 with no problem.

Somewhere along the line, you either have a bad memory chip or you have some bad capacitors causing your PC to behave erraticly.

You can check for bad capacitors by carefully inspecting them for bulging tops or electrolyte leaking out the top vents or out the bottom. The capacitors are those cylindrical can looking things.

If you have more than 1 memory chip in your PC, only leave one in and try loading W2000. If it fails to install, replace that stick, and pull the other one and see if W2000 loads. If it does, you now know you only have a bad memory chip, and you can replace it if you want.

If any of the capacitors (and it only has to be one that looks like I described) are going bad, you will either have to replace the capacitor, or get a replacement motherboard.

If you don't know how to desolder and resolder capacitors on a motherboard, you shouldn't attempt to replace them yourself.

Paul

[John_Tech]

I'm sure this thread is long dead however in the event someone happens to searching for something similar...

check all hardware connections, check bios for all drives posted correctly, check partition table used for win2k, try installing OS on a smaller IDE drive such as a 120Gb or smaller. I wouldn't be wasting my time ghost hunting, if the system boots to bios it's fair to asume the board capacitors are working.  alternatively, visually inspect capacitors for bulges around the tops. search support for bios updates and known issuses.  disconect all drives from system clear Cmos back to manufactures defaults. afterwards boot back to bios check settings for correct post. then install each drive one at a time while checking bios setting between connecting additional hardware/drives. Additionally, if I remember correctly, win2k and winxp both had memory swap issuse on some systems.  I once used a high mem management command/dos utility to negotiate that problem successfully. it's been a very long, I would have to do some back research if someone wants that validated. basically as a starting point, I would look at five points; bios sttings, disk size. partition table, OS instalation method, and master boot record.  it could very well be a long road to simple resolve I've been there lots of times.