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Dagwood
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Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Sat Mar 08, 2014 11:30 am

I just did a brain transplant on a 2006 HP pavilion system that I originally bought in 2006. Single core AMD processor. I have not spent much over 300 bucks to do it but the time it has taken has certainly taken the value part out of the equation.

I was near a Frys Electronics visiting family and had about 30 minutes to kill. I did not have a parts list in my head, but knew about what I wanted. Not really the best way to buid your own computer, but the last time I ordered stuff online, it did not work correctly and sending it back made buying it at Fry's cheaper. I bought an i3 processor (4130) 4G memory (on stick of 1333, yah I know) and a full sized MSI motherboard. 10 minutes after buying the parts I realized I needed a micro ATX motherboard not the full size. When back to the store and returned the motherboard and got an ASUS H85 motherboard. After a 2 hour drive, I opened up the parts at home and found bent pins on the mother board CPU socket. So then I had make a 4 hour round trip drive back to the store and exchange the motherboard back for a new one.

So now, a week later, I was ready to build the new machine. Out with the old parts in with the new. I had replaced the PSU in the old system already, so I had all of the power connections I needed. However, the old CD Rom drive was IDE and my new motherboard only has SATA connections on it. I hooked it all up minus the drive and it went through post just fine. Yay me! But crashed miserably trying to boot windows7 (another earlier upgrade). No real surprises there. Amazon took only 4 days to ship me an IDE to SATA converter ($5.99) and I hooked it up in every imaginable way possible and non of them worked. Fail!

Plan B: The internet says I can make a bootable USB drive with my windows installation disk and a program from the Microsoft website. Good thing I have more than one computer that can read a CD Rom and has windows 7 on it. Otherwise I would be going to plan C, buying a SATA drive. After several attempts at getting Microsofts "Windows USB tool" to work and smashing my head against the wall because of it, I had to make the boot-able USB drive from the command line. That worked perfectly and was much easier then messing with Microsoft's free tool. I just took several hours to format and then xcopy all the files. The one problem I have with USB drive is knowing when to remove the drive. If you just leave it in, it will not boot from the hard-drive when it needs to.

Now my task was finished! Not! No internet connection. Now I needed to do the same process with the CD that came with the motherboard. Now I was finished! Well not really. It took another half day connected to the internet to download SP1 and internet explorer patches.

Good thing I enjoy the process.
 
JustAnEngineer
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Sat Mar 08, 2014 10:29 pm

I have had excellent results with a $12 Rosewill IDE<->SATA bridge.

However, $54 will get you a new SATA Blu-ray/DVD/CD burner or $20 will get you a new SATA DVD/CD burner.
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Dagwood
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Sun Mar 09, 2014 2:14 pm

That 20 dollar DVD drive looks like a winner. I will make sure I click on the link when I order it.

That Windows 7 USB/DVD Download tool was complete frustration for me. I tried it on several different computers and had the same results. When it came time to format the USB drive, it just did not see it. It is a Sandisk 32G drive and works fine in all of the machines. I was able to make it bootable by following the command line steps. Using the Disk part tool.

My new frustration is with a new MS mouse I bought. It is a USB wired mouse and works fine on the old laptop, but the new computer acts like it is not there. I here that one solution is to buy an USB to PS/2 converter.
 
DPete27
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Fri Mar 14, 2014 8:59 am

1) I've used Windows USB DVD tool many many times with only one or two problems. Are you saying the program didn't recognize your flash drive, or were you not able to select the ISO of your Windows installation?

2) The ethernet on most computers works right away after reformatting. I'd suggest downloading mobo drivers from the manufacturer's website anyway because the included driver CD is typically out of date.

3) Sounds like after your 4 hour round-trip back to Fry's, you spent more money on gas than you would have at newegg or the like....I suppose that was more your fault than the hardware, but if you have to return anything, is it assumedly another 4 hour drive? That's more gas money than shipping back to an online retailer. Do you live near a Microcenter? Their CPU+mobo combo deals are unbeatable.

4) Downloading updates for 4+ hours is my LEAST FAVORITE part of any build.
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Chrispy_
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:02 am

The windows tool is useless if you're trying to make a 64-bit ISO bootable whilst using a 32-bit PC to create the stick.
Command-line or 3rd party tools are the solution.

Microsoft's concept of user-friendly tools needs a lot of work :P
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drfish
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Fri Mar 14, 2014 11:13 am

I recommend Rufus.
 
Star Brood
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Fri Mar 14, 2014 12:21 pm

Thank you, this tells me that I should not bother keeping any aspect of my current Dell Precision machine when it's time to upgrade - just upgrade everything at once.
 
Dagwood
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Tue Mar 18, 2014 3:17 am

DPete27 wrote:
1) I've used Windows USB DVD tool many many times with only one or two problems. Are you saying the program didn't recognize your flash drive, or were you not able to select the ISO of your Windows installation?


Using a different computer running the exact same OS as I was trying to reinstall on the other computer, Windows 7 (64bit), I would get to the part where I was told to select the USB drive, but nothing showed up in the window to select. This is after selecting the ISO file that I created from another program.
DPete27 wrote:

2) The ethernet on most computers works right away after reformatting. I'd suggest downloading mobo drivers from the manufacturer's website anyway because the included driver CD is typically out of date.


I needed the motherboard drivers to activate the ethernet. I would have thought the whole processes would have been easier, and in the past it has been. My problem seems to be that the motherboard is newer than windows 7 and myself.

In the end it is working, but I thought my experience might be useful to others so I posted it.
 
Hallucin8
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Tue Mar 18, 2014 6:58 am

drfish wrote:
I recommend Rufus.

Hear hear! It has worked very well for me for Linux and Windows installations.
 
Dagwood
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Re: Brain transplant on a 2006 HP Pavilion in 2014

Mon Apr 07, 2014 1:52 pm

Update: Fixed the USB mouse problem. The USB3.0 driver was listed as "unkown" in the driver list. I thought I had looked at the driver list before, but this time I opened all the sub menus and found the bad driver. All I had to do was right click on it. Once the new driver was in, the mouse was recognized quickly and a new mouse driver automatically installed.

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