Shared Knowledge
"How to: Install Windows XP on HP dv9000t"
4 February 2010
Summary: difficult on virgin C: drive but can be done if you have XP install disks.
Background:
System hard drive on wife's Hewlett Packard (HP) dv9000t died completely, suddenly.
Of course dv9000t out of HP warranty and as drive O.E.M., not covered by normal 5 year Seagate warranty
dv900T uses SATA hard drives.
Bought Seagate Momentus 500GB, 7200RPM drive, 16Mb cache.
Installed Seagate in dv9000t.
In BIOS, changed boot order to CD-ROM as 1st boot device.
Inserted DVD 1 of 2 that of "recovery disks" as instructed by HP.
After waiting for a long time, the recovery disk said, "Recovery not valid for this system." !????
Only a guess but since no recovery partition on the new drive, recovery disks would not load. Trash.
Inserted my Windows XP (XP) upgrade version CD into CD-ROM and rebooted system.
XP install said no Windows operating system found on drive and to insert CD of prior version.
Inserted Windows 98 install CD into CD-Rom, XP confirmed I was qualified for XP update and proceeded with the XP install.
XP install continued but after loading various drivers into memory, said "Windows could not find any hard drives and was terminating install."
What? Drives are installed!
SATA I, SATA II problem? NO. SATA I has a transfer speed of 150Mbps (megabits per sec) whereas SATA II has a transfer speed of 300Mbps. SATA controllers are supposed to be able to auto negotiate with the hard drive and establish either 150 or 300Mbps transfer. But I have found instants where a SATA II drive would not work with my system unless I jumpered it to only transfer at 150Mbps. So I checked the Seagate hard drive and sure enough it had a place for jumpers on the edge connector but no instructions on which pins to jumper to force 150Mbps (default is 300Mbps). Internet research revealed I need to jumper left most 2 pins as looking at hard drive connector with bottom of the hard drive facing upward. Got a pin jumper and installed. Tried Windows XP install again and same problem: hard drive not found!
SATA Native Support setting in BIOS. I can not claim credit: found it doing research on the Internet about the "disk not found" problem. Turns out, Windows XP will not see SATA drives if HP dv9000t BIOS has "SATA Native Support" enabled. Once this BIOS setting changed, XP found the new C: drive and install proceeded normally, well for a while anyway.
Missing drivers. Once XP finished installing a check of "System" in control panel, revealed many yellow explanation points meaning missing device drivers. Not unexpected. So using another computer, went to HP's support website and downloaded all drivers, +, related to the dv9000 running XP. Of course in several areas, HP listed more than one driver for a specific function, such as audio and video and nothing indicating if one driver should be installed before another or not.
Driver Problems. Ok, so I install one driver after another and slowly but surely get rid of most of the yellow explanation marks showing on System Manager but can not seem to get Conexant Audio driver to install. Driver install says device is not present in system. Under the audio section of HP's driver download page for the dv9000t is Microsoft Universal Audio Architecture (UAA) Bus Driver for High Definition Audio. I install this and it appears to install and then I try the Conexant driver again but still it does not find media device. Finally, I try another approach. I go into Control Panel and click on "add hardware" and go through menus until finally I am where I say I want to see all possible devices to install and there, right at the top is that universal audio architecture driver. Already installed it twice but click to install it again and this time different XP responses and it appears to have actually installed. Now try to install Conexant driver again and XP responds different and sure enough, all yellow explanation marks are gone inside System Manager and I have sound.
SATA Native Support in BIOS. Ok, once all drivers loaded thought perhaps I could turn back on, enable, SATA Native Support in the BIOS, but when I tried, got a Window blue screen of death. Weird as dv9000t came from factory with SATA Native Support enabled? No matter, system works.
If only. If only HP had provided some guidance on how exactly to install all their custom drivers and in which order, hours spent trying to come up with a solution to missing audio could have been avoided.