New hard drive & windows XP but no ports &

The hard drive on my HP laptop died. Of course I never burned the XP media ed. to a CD. They don't supply them anymore. The new hard drive came with a copy of XP Pro. I installed this per instructions but it seems to missing drivers or something. It doesn't recoginze the wireless card, USB ports..... nothing. I can bolt in parts and do a few basic commands but I am essentially computer illiterate. Thanks

You need to go to the HP website and download the drivers.

XP probably doesn't have your network card drivers so just download them on another computer. Copy them over to your laptop and install them. Now surf to the HP web site and download all of the drivers for your laptop.


Usually HP will send recovery media for your laptop (along with drivers) for a small fee. This version of XP will activate with the laptop whereas the version you got with the HD will most likely have to activate with Microsoft.

Thanks I will do that tonight.

What model of HP laptop is it?

Ad DosFreak said try down loading the drivers from the HP Website.

Next time you buy a laptop from HP or someone i would burn the back up CD's.

OH and also the original Hard Drive has a Recovery Partition on it so you could have recovered it by using that, it you could still access that part of the drive. No nee to boot windows XP to do that.