Posting this for 2 reasons: 1) To warn anyone else who would attempt to do this, and 2) Suggestions.
A customer brought me a HP 11-n010dx that had issues. The biggest issue being windows 8. She hates it. My suggestion was to downgrade to Windows 7 and she agreed.
What a mistake.
The first problem was installation. Nothing worked. The unit does not have a DVD, so it was a matter of installing via USB - either a thumbdrive or external player. Long story short, nothing worked. I went through more than a dozen thumbdrives created in every manner I know of - Rufus UEFI, ISOmagic, ISO to USB, etc. Nothing worked. I kept getting the "A required CD/DVD device driver is missing" message from the windows installer.
I then went to the players: Memorex, Asus, LG - using different ISO's burned in different manners. Again, nothing. I did some research and found others had the same problem,and while there may have been some solutions that might have worked, I chose the one that offered the path of least resistance - wipe the drive and create 2 partitions. One partition, 10gb, which held the Windows 7 installation. So, after reinstalling the drive in the machine it booted and installed just fine.
Which brings me to my current dilemma - just a few of the drivers actually installed. No ethernet, no wifi, no USB, no graphics....all the essentials were missing. Now I am stuck with a machine I cannot work on. I cannot install a wifi adapter to run driver software, nor can I use the ethernet port. Needless to say, none of the USB ports work so there is no transfering drivers to the machine, even if I could find them (HP only supplies 8 and 10 drivers). And, even if I found the drivers, I would have to disassemble the machine again to put them on the hard drive and reinstall it.
I have installed 7 on well over 100 machines and have never failed to complete a full installation. Some have been very problematic, but in the end, all the installations worked. Because of this, I did not backup the hard drive in anticipation of problems. So, at this point, I am faced with having to disassemble the machine again and install windows 8 (to be upgraded to 10), or, if possible, install 10 directly. The problem with this is - I have no product keys to use for either.
I did a seach here in the forums and could not find any similar problems from which to draw useful advice from, so I am asking here in this thread. Has anyone had a similar problem? Does anyone have any advice to offer?
Thanks,
Rick
A customer brought me a HP 11-n010dx that had issues. The biggest issue being windows 8. She hates it. My suggestion was to downgrade to Windows 7 and she agreed.
What a mistake.
The first problem was installation. Nothing worked. The unit does not have a DVD, so it was a matter of installing via USB - either a thumbdrive or external player. Long story short, nothing worked. I went through more than a dozen thumbdrives created in every manner I know of - Rufus UEFI, ISOmagic, ISO to USB, etc. Nothing worked. I kept getting the "A required CD/DVD device driver is missing" message from the windows installer.
I then went to the players: Memorex, Asus, LG - using different ISO's burned in different manners. Again, nothing. I did some research and found others had the same problem,and while there may have been some solutions that might have worked, I chose the one that offered the path of least resistance - wipe the drive and create 2 partitions. One partition, 10gb, which held the Windows 7 installation. So, after reinstalling the drive in the machine it booted and installed just fine.
Which brings me to my current dilemma - just a few of the drivers actually installed. No ethernet, no wifi, no USB, no graphics....all the essentials were missing. Now I am stuck with a machine I cannot work on. I cannot install a wifi adapter to run driver software, nor can I use the ethernet port. Needless to say, none of the USB ports work so there is no transfering drivers to the machine, even if I could find them (HP only supplies 8 and 10 drivers). And, even if I found the drivers, I would have to disassemble the machine again to put them on the hard drive and reinstall it.
I have installed 7 on well over 100 machines and have never failed to complete a full installation. Some have been very problematic, but in the end, all the installations worked. Because of this, I did not backup the hard drive in anticipation of problems. So, at this point, I am faced with having to disassemble the machine again and install windows 8 (to be upgraded to 10), or, if possible, install 10 directly. The problem with this is - I have no product keys to use for either.
I did a seach here in the forums and could not find any similar problems from which to draw useful advice from, so I am asking here in this thread. Has anyone had a similar problem? Does anyone have any advice to offer?
Thanks,
Rick
