HP Pavilion a1020n. HD had bad sectors and a new Hitachi 640 GB HD installed. We used the HP recovery disc set, 11 discs, and it will not load the os which was XP. It will go through all 11 discs and then sit on the blue screen stating " please wait this may take a while". Well after sitting overnight it was found on the black Winows XP screen and the three section blue progress cursor at the bottom was frozen.

We started over and made sure the bios had the cd rom selected as the first boot device. Then we inserted the first recovery disc and restarted. Now it won't even recognize the disc, saying it isn't disc #1.

Is it possible we have a bad recovery disc set? Do we need to make sure the new HD is clean by (re) formatting it and getting a new os such as Windows 7 and installing it? As of right now there is nothing on the new HD that I can tell.

We've been fighting this for a couple of weeks and we are getting frustrated....Any help would be appreciated!

Thanks,

Mark

Greetings.

11 disks for an XP install? Never heard of that.

Here is your model page at HP:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/product...ng=en&cc=us

Performing an HP System Recovery in Windows XP:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...880&lang=en


Is your new hard drive the same as the old?

The old was a SATA I drive:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...880&lang=en

This raises two questions:

If you replace a SATA I with a SATA II you must reset the rear jumper to SATA I. However if the BIOS detects this new drive that should not be an issue.

Second question is you might need to load SATA drivers during the install process. However I see no such downloads for your model:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwar...;product=459880


If you are ready to upgrade to Windows 7 I would certainly suggest it. However you would probably also need to upgrade your RAM and the Graphics card to get the full advantage of such an upgrade.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/documen...880&lang=en

















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This post has been edited by jephree: Oct 31 2009, 10:22 PM