Lost all my drivers

[Ryan275]

Hey. My dad gave me one of his old laptops that I was going to use for my kids for school work online from covid.

HP Pavilion dv2500

S/N [Personal Information Removed]

P/N KC457UA#ABC

I factory reset the laptop. Once it was complete I tried a bunch of times to use windows update. It wouldn't work. So my dad gave me the original windows Vista so I plugged the disk in to see if that would fix my issues. But when Vista was loaded it lost all the drivers for anything. Internet, USB, wireless etc. It doesn't have factory reset in the windows program tab anymore. I tried to restart the laptop and press f11 to force a factory reset but all it did was beep when I would press f11 and once I stopped it would load to the windows. Can I buy a factory reset disk I can use? 

[WAWood]

@Ryan275 

<Sigh>  Every time I read one of these Factory-Reset-Failed posts I cringe and continue to wonder why everyone seems to think a factory reset is a miracle cure when, in many cases, it only serves to make things worse!

The main problem is that NOW, you need recovery media and no one has carried Vista media in years, so basically, there is nowhere you can go to get what you need to reinstall the laptop.

[Paul_Tikkanen]

Hi, @Ryan275 

Microsoft has ended updates for Vista...see this link.

Windows Update SHA-1 based endpoints discontinued for older Windows devices (microsoft.com)

HP retires support for PC's that are 10 years old or more, which is why you can't easily find any drivers for your notebook.

Here are the links to the major drivers you need so you can use the notebook...Not sure why the USB ports aren't working though.

Chipset...also installs the ethernet driver.

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp37501-38000/sp37730.exe

Graphics:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp36501-37000/sp36729.exe

Audio:

ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp40001-40500/sp40270.exe

Wifi:

https://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp50501-51000/sp50744.exe

If you can get a USB port to work, and you can install the above drivers, let me know and I will give you the links to most of the others you may need, but you would need to let me know the device description of the devices that need drivers and the hardware ID's.

Use this guide for how to find the hardware ID for a device...

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

Otherwise, the only place I know of where you can buy a Vista recovery disk would be from this vendor at the link below...

Computer Surgeons - Recovery Kit 464248-121 For HP Model Number dv2713ca