HP M8530F PAVILLION MEDIA CENTER - Need Help

  I have a HP M8530F PAVILLION MEDIA CENTER that will not boot up.

This system apparently was sold as a package with VISTA (groan!).
I do not have the recovery disk(s)  that came with it.

I have tried to install a fresh XP and VISTA on it, but neither
installation will work.  The installs fail almost immediately.

This M8530F machine is strictly SATA (no PATA), and I interpret its
BIOS  to show that SATA driver(s) are needed for any install to even
get started.

I have GOOGLE'd for help but have only found that my problems are
hardly unique.  I looked for, but did not find, some kind of start-up
procedure that someone has used and  that I could use to get this
thing started up - but found nothing that I could get to work.  One
GOOGLE respondent was an individual who gave up on its M2N78-LA
motherboard in favor of a Gigabyte replacement, which he said worked.
Maybe I have to do that too?

I am looking for some sort of procedure/technique by which I can
install VISTA (or preferably XP) the normal way - from DVD/CD disk.
Anyone have a suggestion?  Or tell me to get another motherboard?

Thanks

Duke

 On 2/1/2011 2:09 PM, jw@eldorado.com wrote:

Can you elaborate on "the installs fail almost immediately"?

  wrote:
tell me to get another motherboard?

Actually, when I try this, the boot process does not start the usual
downloads from the install disk (XP for example).  It seems the BIOS
sometimes does not recognize any of the SATA drives (HDD or DVD), and
other times recognizes them but the downloads do not occur.  Seems
odd, but that's the case.

Duke

 On 2/1/2011 6:41 PM, jw@eldorado.com wrote:

So, you're sometimes having problems *before* the drive selection screen?

 wrote:


Yeh I guess you could say that.  You see, the resident BIOS wants to
identify both the DVD drive and the HDD as SATA drives, which means of
course a SATA driver must be involved.  Wherefrom I have no idea.  The
motherboard has no PATA connection, so I can't install to a PATA
drive.  Google readings indicate that others have the same problem
with this motherboard.

Duke