glricht
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Some of you may have run into this, but I hadn't and wanted to give a "heads up" in case somebody else hits it too.
A customer wanted us to do a complete rebuild of XP on his HP Pavilion. So after doing the appropriate backups, I did a full System Recovery using the recovery partition (F10 from the bios screen). On the very first reboot, before XP even came up, a window was displayed stating that the PC had a "configuration error" and to call HP; at the end of the message was "(code purple)". I couldn't do anything at that point except power-off! Subsequent reboots produced the same behavior. There was thread in Technibble last year about this, but there was no definitive consensus as to what to do.
I spent a LOT of hours trying to determine what "configuration" errors could be causing this. Other people who had run into this and called HP said that HP either said the mobo was bad or to send the PC in for repair. I knew the mobo was OK and had just about decided to do an OEM install when I found a way to bypass the "configuration error".
Turns out that the "configuration error" is actually a booby trap placed in HP and Compaq computers in which a “tattoo” or numerical signature of the motherboard and hardware configuration is created at the factory and encoded into the recovery partition. When you do a system recovery, it checks to make sure the system has not been modified. If the system has been updated, the “tattoo” generated by the checking program will be different than the original, and the system will not boot!
The underlying problem is a .bat file that calls a python script to check the tattoo on boot up after a recovery. If you remove that call, then there is no check and the machine boots up just fine and continues the recovery process.
Here's what to do: after the system recovery is done, boot up a stand-alone CD (e.g. BART, UBCD4Win) that allows you to edit a file. Ensure you can see hidden files and go into
C:\hp\bin\ConfigCheck\cfgchk.bat
Either delete or remark-out the line that calls the run.py script.
Save the updated .bat file and reboot. You should now be able to continue the XP setup.
Hope this helps somebody avoid the time and aggravation I went through. (I won't go into how angry I was when I discovered the root problem!
)
p.s. I understand that Vista users have run into a similar situation and the fix, although similar, is a little different.
A customer wanted us to do a complete rebuild of XP on his HP Pavilion. So after doing the appropriate backups, I did a full System Recovery using the recovery partition (F10 from the bios screen). On the very first reboot, before XP even came up, a window was displayed stating that the PC had a "configuration error" and to call HP; at the end of the message was "(code purple)". I couldn't do anything at that point except power-off! Subsequent reboots produced the same behavior. There was thread in Technibble last year about this, but there was no definitive consensus as to what to do.
I spent a LOT of hours trying to determine what "configuration" errors could be causing this. Other people who had run into this and called HP said that HP either said the mobo was bad or to send the PC in for repair. I knew the mobo was OK and had just about decided to do an OEM install when I found a way to bypass the "configuration error".
Turns out that the "configuration error" is actually a booby trap placed in HP and Compaq computers in which a “tattoo” or numerical signature of the motherboard and hardware configuration is created at the factory and encoded into the recovery partition. When you do a system recovery, it checks to make sure the system has not been modified. If the system has been updated, the “tattoo” generated by the checking program will be different than the original, and the system will not boot!
The underlying problem is a .bat file that calls a python script to check the tattoo on boot up after a recovery. If you remove that call, then there is no check and the machine boots up just fine and continues the recovery process.
Here's what to do: after the system recovery is done, boot up a stand-alone CD (e.g. BART, UBCD4Win) that allows you to edit a file. Ensure you can see hidden files and go into
C:\hp\bin\ConfigCheck\cfgchk.bat
Either delete or remark-out the line that calls the run.py script.
Save the updated .bat file and reboot. You should now be able to continue the XP setup.
Hope this helps somebody avoid the time and aggravation I went through. (I won't go into how angry I was when I discovered the root problem!
)p.s. I understand that Vista users have run into a similar situation and the fix, although similar, is a little different.
