DV6000-DV9000 Notebooks with no recovery disc's...

Here's a trick I finally figured out with these notebooks. According to HP Tech Support, you have to buy the recovery disc's for each notebook. According to them even if you have 1,2,3,4 DV6000's [or what ever series] that came without recovery disc's, no recovery disc's & no hard drive, or the hard drive was completely wiped clean, they told me there is no way to install the operating system on the notebook unless it matches the BIOS/Product Number.

Once I started reflowing  the GPU's on some of the notebooks that either had the "turn on off, on off" problem or the "Black Screen" problem and I was able to see a working screen, I was ready to buy the software from HP & with some luck make some money. Well, after I looked at 3 notebooks that I have ready, I thought, well, now I'll need $75 worth the software. Now here is the trick that I wish I would have tried a year ago.

One of the notebooks I purchased [DV6000] that actually worked fine once I replaced the water damaged keyboard. Well, on this notebook, it came with the original hard drive, along with the recovery partition. I used "Acronis" & used the "Clone Disc" option. I installed the newly cloned hard drive into a DV9000 & hit the "F-11" key during bootup which starts the factory install/ Recovery option. All Pavilions with 15.4" screens & up use the same size mainboard. The mainboards may have a different part number but like I said, they're pretty much the same board. Note: If you clone a hard drive from an AMD board, your install has to be AMD. Same goes for Intel. This is the only thing that will not allow you to use the cloned hard drive. During the recovery, you'll be prompted to either save all your data from the "C:" to another drive, or just continue with the recovery. Since I really didn't need all the data, I decided to just do the factory recovery install. [I can always do another Clone Disc & save the data to reinstall since I plan on keeping the DV6000 I used, for a few more hard drive clones.]

Once it completed the factory install, [fingers crossed] I let it bootup. Bare in mind, the DV6000 had a 1.6GHz processor & the DV9000 came with a 2.0GHz processor. I figured if it worked on this notebook then it should work on all the others since they all have 1.8-2.0GHz processor's & are all DV6000's.

Well, it loaded up fine. No issues at all. I had it hard wired when I went online to HP's site. Once there, I clicked on the "Drivers/Software" option & let HP decide what drivers I needed. Now here's what I had to do. Like I said I let the website do the automatic detection for driver look up but when it told me that it wasn't the DV9000 but rather the DV6000, I stopped & just backed myself out of the auto detect & typed the "Correct Product Number" into the "Search Field" & then checked device manager in "Windows" to see what drivers I might need to install at this point. Microsoft Windows Updates will scan your notebook & offer hardware updates, usually in the "optional updates". That's a nice feature but I still like to check HP first to make sure I'm installing the correct drivers from the get go. That way I'm not downloading & installing two different sets of drivers.

So far the DV9000 runs like new. The temperature of the Heatsink is under 30 Deg. Celsius.  Once the GPU has been reflowed, I remove the pad from the Heatsink that HP assumes will keep the GPU running cool &  replace it with copper shims. What ever the measurement is, I add a bit more so there is always pressure being applied to the GPU. This will help insure that in the advent the notebook should start to run hot due to a dirty Heatsink, the GPU will stay as tight as possible to the board.

I guess I could have made a short guide but I try to cover as much as possible so readers who are doing this for the first time will feel more confident. I just wish I tried this when I started fixing these HP Pavilion's with the GPU problem over the last couple of years. I've purchased a lot of software from HP since 99% of what's sold either has no software or the hard drive has been removed.

Once I get a few more finished, I'll add to the guide so readers will know if it works with other DV6000's.