Quote (George W Carver @ Sep. 01 2006, 7:24 am)

Are the recovery disks scratched or dirty, maybe a defect in the disk. Are the disks correctly identified by another HP computer. Does the CD drive have read errors. Might do a diagnostic.

Recovery disks are fine. Other computers say they're wrong, and both CD drives have the same effect, I doubt both of them decided to fail all of a sudden.

The product check the recovery CDs are doing is looking for a certain valid product code - usually this is stored in the BIOS (Dell calls it the "service tag", no idea what HP calls it).

Since that's usually stored in a re-writable section of the PROM, it's theoretically possible for that to get overwritten or blanked out, especially if that PC was sent away for service at any point and the tech working on it forgot to reset it (Dell's done this to us at work on occasion - I was told that an invalid or missing service tag could cause things like RAID controllers to not function, which is a crappy design, but I'm stuck with it).

Anyway, I would suggest looking at HP's site for any utilities they've got to reset the BIOS (they may not be publicly available - I got a "technicians only" CD from Dell at one point that had their utility to do this).  Alternatively, if you can determine that the BIOS does in fact have a proper value stored for the system ID, something else might be corrupt in the BIOS, so you may be able to recover this by a simple BIOS upgrade (or overwrite if you've already got the most current version), which should be available from HP somewhere.

Otherwise, assuming HP did, in fact, send you the right disks, that PC with the recovery CDs is a doorstop unless you can get a regular XP install CD and forget about the recovery CDs.

Good luck.