Query on what hard drive to use on HP Pavilion Dv2000 Entertainment PC DV2203AU

[rfengg]

Dear All,

My younger son was gifted a HP Pavilion Dv2000 Entertainment PC DV2203AU by my dad and we lost the hard disk in an unfortunate accident. I would like to revive the unit due to its sentimental value but am stuck on deciding what hard disk to replace it with? Does anybody have the hard disk details of the original unit? The serial number of the laptop is 2CE7032MPF and it uses a AMD Turion 64*2 processor.

Can I buy a 240GB Kingston SSD  and install a licenced Windows 7 on it? The HP Pavilion dv2000 manual says it supports hard drives only from 160GB to 80GB.

I perhaps stupidly tried to boot this unit using a SATA to USB cable connected to a Windows 7 hard disk from another working HP laptop but it refuses to boot up. It goes to the Windows loading page and then I can see the blue screen for a sec and then the laptop repeats the whole process again.

Any help would be appreciated in getting this unit going again.

[Huffer]

This is an AMD unit from the infamous DV2000 series that had video card issues and spawned a class action lawsuit and silent recall. They are very modern looking machines, but a few generations old in terms of hardware. The hard drives are SATA form factor but it is an IDE interface not true SATA so SSDs are not fully supported and kind of a waste of money.  

The Service Manual I found says they came with drives up to 120 gig:

Manual

I seem to recall the early versions of this model such as the one you have are capacity limited to a 120 gig capacity hard drive. These are now hard to find and you are likely going to have to settle for a used or refurbished one:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Hitachi-HTS543212L9A300-P-N-0A57262-MLC-DA2352-120GB-SATA-Laptop-Hard-Drive...

If you PM me I actually have several laptop SATA drives that would work that I will never use again. Happy to send a couple for the cost of shipping. 

HP has taken down all the support pages for this model series. It likely originally came with Windows Vista but we did a lot of work on the old Forum helping people downgrade them to XP, which they do very well. They max at 2 or 3 gigs RAM so Windows 10 is not going to give very good performance and that is frankly also true of Vista and 7. You could likely find an original Windows Vista restore disk for it at computersurgeons.com. 

Post back with any more questions. I am a vintage laptop refurbisher and fully familiar with this model; I've replaced and fixed lots of motherboards on these a few years back. 

[rfengg]

Thanks Huffer......wow......you really seem to know your laptops!!!

Some comments and queries if you don't mind.....

a) Page 3-11 of the manual you posted says that the 120-GB hard drive is only for use with Intel processors. Mine has a  AMD Turion 64*2 processor , so should I stick with a 100GB or lesser hard drive capacity?

b) Considering how cheap SSD's are these days, I would prefer to go for a 60GB or 80GB Hard disk (if 120GB will not work on this model)............you mentioned that "SSDs are not fully supported and kind of a waste of money."........will SSD's not work at all on this machine or is it worth a shot?

c) I would also prefer to have XP installed as I allready have a disk and licence for XP, but was worried about XP not supporting TRIM for SSD's?

best regards.

[Huffer · Accepted solution]

The hard drive capacity thing is not AMD v. Intel its something called Large Block Addressing which is an issue with IDE storage controllers. HP may have only offered the 120 on Intel machines but both the Intel and AMD versions in the early dv2000s would be limited to not bigger than a 120 gig hard drive. 

SSD would "work" but not quite "right". TRIM and Native Command Queing require "native sata" i.e. ahci mode and this laptop does not have it I seem to recall. That's why Windows XP can be installed on them with no tricks. XP will not work natively with a true SATA hard drive or SSD it requires a driver hack on installation and these AMD DV2000s don't require that: you can just put Windows XP on. So using a SATA SSD on these machines just makes no sense. 

So put XP on it using a hard drive 120 gigs or smaller. You will get the best performance out of it at the most reasonable cost. It is not going to be a daily driver computer, right? It's more of a project for personal reasons. 

[rfengg]

Well I finally decided to bite the bullet and bought a 120GB Kingston SSD for the laptop .

On a wing and a prayer, I installed Windows 7 and I was surprised to say the least........the installation went allmost flawlessly and the laptop is allmost back to perfect.

The laptop gets pretty hot though after 2 hrs and with a temp monitoring program , I could see the CPU temp was above 70 degrees centigrade........next step is to open up the laptop and give the fan a good cleaning with some new thermal paste for the CPU.