Upgrade from XP home to Pro won't complete

  • Thread starter Thread starter Cindy
  • Start date Start date
C

Cindy

Hello everyone and thanks in advance-

I am attempting to upgrade to XP Professional from Home on
a brand new hp Pavilion a630n that I've had for only a
week. The install can't seem to get past the pre-install
steps. Once it starts trying to boot XP Pro, it goes into
an endless loop of:

1. Black screen with Press any key to boot from CD...
2. Another black screen with choices that disappears too
fast to read, but appears to be a choice to configure it
3. Attempt to boot Windows XP Pro
4. Blue hp Invent screen with various options, one of
which is F10, System Recovery, which I have done about 5
times now to get out of this endless loop. Works
perfectly every time and goes back to the way it was out
of the box.

Hp told me to set BIOS to Load Setup Defaults and
disconnect all peripherals. That only helped to the point
that I can now see the black screen in number 2 and
actually read it (only once though; it then goes back to
going through these 4 steps over and over).

Next Hp told me to run FDISK, run System recovery from
cd's they are going to me and then upgrade the operating
system. Clearly, they do not understand that I can get
back to Home edition with no problem. I think it's
ridiculous to have to run FDISK at this point! I emailed
them back to clarify and haven't heard yet.

Microsoft won't give me free support because Home edition
is OEM provided, and my upgrade product key doesn't fit in
the box they provide for email support. I am so
frustrated! The upgrade is one I bought through our
bookstore (I work for a university) so I could get my
academic discount. Do you suppose that's the problem?
Should I return it and just get the expensive upgrade?

Thanks for reading this long.

Cindy
 
I am suffering similar problems with my own Pavilion
a630N and an XP-Pro Upgrade retail package. Did you
ever figure out how to get around the problems?
 
Make it three of us. New a630n and exactly the same problems as Cindy
documents - right down to the script the HP Customer Care (in India) people
use that has them offer to send recovery cd's when I don't need them. MS
tried to help but couldn't offer anythying better than to keep "uninstalling"
drivers and trying to complete the upgrade in SAFE mode. None of it worked
so far. No one has been able to tell me what it is trying to do when it
stops. In my case the blue dots get about 3/4 of the way across the band and
then stop when XP Pro is trying to load.
 
Finally, some progress!

With MS Support assistance I was guided through what is called a "parallel"
install of XP Pro. This process involved setting the CD-ROM as a boot drive,
booting from the CD and proceeding to install XP Pro to a different folder.
In my case we installed to WINXP instead of WINDOWS (where Home is still
installed).

I made a mistake in the process which may have caused a Fatal Exception
after the first reboot during this attempt. The mistake was hitting a key
and booting from the CD again. I had to F3 out of that situation, the
install then continued until the Fatal Exception. I hit OK looked at the log
entry, closed that up and rebooted again. This time install continued to a
successful conclusion. Now I have a choice presented to me when I start up
the machine. 1. Boot Home, 2. Boot Pro or 3. Boot the Recovery Console.

The XP Pro install was not entirely complete, though. 5 "devices" were in
Device Manager as yellow question marks. I now need to go through a tedious
process of pointing XP Pro to the Home folders to "find" each of the missing
drivers and pull the appropriate (hp proprietary?) drivers and files across
to the XP Pro folder structure.

Then I can decide whether or not to leave both OS's on it or remove Home.
No applications were "migrated" to XP Pro during this process but since it
was a new machine only the pre-installed "junk" was on it. I will install my
own versions of NAV and other apps manually.
 
you may find that it is a hidden partition on your hp which is causing
the problems, a normal format or fdisk won't touch this. I had a very
similar experience on a dell. first back up all your data. then use
killdisk or the hard drive tool (available free from the hdd
manufacturers website) to low level format the whole disk. once done
then boot from your xp pro cd, partition and NTFS format the drive and
the install should go just fine. then you will have to reinstall your
software an your data. also if you can run the xp cd from a standard cd
drive rather than a cd/dvd multiformat this often helps if it's having
any probs copying files
 
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