HP Compaq nc-8430 Recovery Disc ISOs

[CuzImDestroyer]

Good day everybody!
I happened to find an old Compaq-nc8430 Business notebook, which came preinstalled with Windows XP Professional. The original hard drive is long gone and was already replaced with a SSD, no recovery discs whatsoever. Since I restore old electronics, I wanted to give that notebook a new life. Thinking about that for a moment, I wanted to install the original OEM OS on there with all the drivers, since I wanna see how Windows XP performs today & how all the drivers really work, since I couldn't get the system to work with a normal Windows XP installation nor Windows 7. Does somebody here in the HP community have these old recovery discs and mind sharing them? I would be really happy if that would be possible, aswell as maybe uploading it to archive.org in order for it to be preserved.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

What was the problem with W7?

W7 should work just fine on that PC.

I'm running W10 on a nc6400 which is the thin and light model of the nc8430.

You just have to use the Vista drivers for things that don't work.

XP:  You either have go into the BIOS and disable SATA Native Mode to install XP, or you can slipstream the SATA AHCI drivers into a copy of the XP installation media or load them at the F6 prompt using a USB floppy disk drive.

If you install XP with sata native mode disabled, I can give you a way to change the drive controller driver to AHCI so you can go back and change the setting to SATA Native Mode enabled.

[CuzImDestroyer]

Hello!
Thank you for the fast reply. Well, it happened to be a real struggle to get the right drivers first, like the ATI X1600 graphics card (which sorta worked out in the end, since I got a Microsoft Catalog website to get it from) but apart from that the Vista drivers often just didn't work at all or were broken for me. 

Thanks aswell for the tip on the Windows XP installation, already got that noted down to check. For your info, I have just been trying to use the actual OS disc which is preserved on archive.org, but it says I'd need the restore disc in order to function. Ontop of that, it is really hard work to get every driver installed even on Windows XP, some didn't work for me there aswell.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

You're very welcome.

Those notebook had two recovery disks.   One for the OS only, and one for the drivers only.

You booted from the OS disk first and install Windows. 

Then you run the driver disk from the Windows desktop and you can elect to install all of the drivers or just check the ones you want installed.

For the graphics, on W7 you have to manually install the Vista driver and it works fine.

If you let me know what drivers you need, I will give you the links to them.

You can post the hardware ID's for the devices that need drivers to make things easy.

How to Find Drivers for Unknown Devices in the Device Manager (howtogeek.com)

Unfortunately, I have no idea where you will be able to find recovery disks anymore for that model series.

I know HP doesn't have any.

[CuzImDestroyer]

Hello again! Well, nice to finally know that the system initially got shipped with two discs. Sad though that HP doesn't have those anymore, I'm glad I made some for my HP Pavilion t3553.de Desktop since those are also not available online. If someone needs those I'm happy to share my ISOs. Well, I'm going to look onto that installation issue if I'll have the time, if I have any problems I'll definetely message you, thank you very much!

Never saw though that there was a driver disc, I only saw the Recovery Plus! and the HP OS disc around, well so apparently three discs.

If someone though reads this topic and may have those old discs/ISOs, please send them here or upload them on archive.org. It would be so nice since then old tech gets preserved and can be used in the future.

[CuzImDestroyer]

Small update, I found the Norton Ghost Partition and it works. I now have the original OS running and I can create recovery ISOs/discs. One small problem though, the language/interface locale is set to Russian. Is there a possible way to change that?

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi:

See if this guide is of help to you...

Changing OS Languages in Windows XP | Aaron Snowberger's Home Abroad (wordpress.com)

You can download XP SP3 from the link below...first file listed.

Microsoft Update Catalog

[CuzImDestroyer]

Hi! Doesn't work sadly, won't let me change it.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Sorry that didn't work.

I found this video which seems to provide a different approach...

How to Change the Language on Windows XP Proffesional - YouTube

[CuzImDestroyer]

Alrighty, it did work! Thank you very much. So, the recovery partition successfully installed aswell, should I give the ISOs to the guys here or how should I do that? Since well, I think it would be nice for other people who have been searching for years could finally get the OEM OS back.