Still Struggling to Recover from Win 10

[BobH]

Jay Freedman - a great American and true hero of mine - has put himself out there for me in ways for which I shall be forever grateful. I'm certain that under his instruction I will get my Win 7 HPE system back. We have encountered some delay; so I'm trying to use the time to try a few things on my own.

One of the attempts I've made is to install XP as a precursor to installing the Win 7 Upgrade license I hold. I've set the BIOS boot priorities as they need to be and can even start reading the XP DVD. I can respond with keyboard commands up to a point, then my keyboard entries are either not sent or not recognized by the setup process. I get to the EULA agreement screens. I can page up and down but pressing the F8 key - needed to agree to the EULA - yields no response. Neither does pressing Enter or other keys.

I'm curious as to why at some points I can use the keyboard to respond but not others. Even at the EULA agreement page, I can use some keys but not others. I have no reason to believe that I have a hardware problem with the keyboard, but that is always a possibility. Because the computer has no os, I cannot run diagnostics at this point.

Are there other ways to send the F8 key press command to the setup process? . . . some key sequence that might be in ASCII or some other form?

Enquiring minds and all that . . .

[JoeP]

You might want to read Clean Install Windows 7 with Upgrade Media. You don't have to go back to XP firdt.

Joe

[BobH]

Thanks, Joe!

I read Thurrott's article and it helped me to get a crippled version of Win 7 on my SSD. I was unable to do so using the normal installation option. This took me to a BSoD every time I tried. Finally, after the first load from optical disk, I chose the Custom option and Win 7 proceeded to install. I say 'crippled' because I got a message saying some drivers didn't install correctly and apparently both the mouse driver and the keyboard driver were among them. While I can use some keys, I cannot use others. For example, after getting the Win 7 splash screen and chime, I have a mouse pointer but it does not respond to mouse movements or clicks. I can press Enter and get the Start Menu, and I can use the arrow keys to get to Control Panel. I was able to Tab to get to Large Icon options which displayed Device Menu. I could select it using arrow keys but Enter would not load the Device Manager. If I knew which drivers to use, I could use this laptop to find them, put them on a flash drive and take them to the desktop USB but I fear I would be unable to select them and initiate their installation.

Again, thanks for the tips. I'm still working at it.