Hey I'm back from hawaii (if anybody noticed I was gone)

I have four days to fix my mother's computer before I go back to college.

Anyway, what would cause a computer to falsely report that recovery cds are wrong for the model? I had a set of hp recovery cds I thought were for her computer. I ran them, and the computer said that they were not for her model HP. So I called up HP, ordered new recovery cds, just tried them and it still says its wrong.

I replaced the hard drive by the way so its completely blank.

you probably need to "fdisk" the drive and/or setup the primary partition

How do I fdisk the drive? Its blank and whenever I let it start up without the cds all I get is "NTLDR is missing, press Ctrl alt delete..."

Theres no floppy drive. I'll try to make a boot CD, but my burner has been ####ing up lately.

yeah. for fdisk you pretty much need a bootable DOS disk.  


I would be tempted to just go buy a winXP CD and install a generic copy of windows instead of the HP version.
you might need a motherboard driver from the HP site (or NIC driver).  and you'll lose all the HP 'instant update' crap (and any other software that came with the machine).
but at least you'll have a real windows disk

Okay problems:

I found my maxtor CD, ran all the utilities and repartioning, and it still says that they're the wrong cds. What do I do with this heap of #### next?

Before you put in the Hp recovery Disks did you re shuffle the boot order in the BIOS so it will boot from the Hp recovery Disks.

If the CD is saying that it's the wrong one, then yeah Carver, it is booting from th CD

Have you made *any* hardware changes to the comp since it was bought, other than the new HD?
Alsom could it be the new HD itself? Maybe the HP versions of XP are coded to only install with the original hard drive.

Either way, I would go with Cobalt and pick up an actual XP disk. That way you'll get a hassle-free, regular install devoid of all that packaged crap, and the disc will no doubt come in handy at a later date.
Besides, if it's your mom's comp, she'll probably spring for the disc.

Quote (Harles @ Aug. 31 2006, 2:43 pm)

If the CD is saying that it's the wrong one, then yeah Carver, it is booting from th CD

If the computer doesn't reconize the disks that were made by it's very own OS, if it were hardware changes wouldn't you just get error mesagers that said a certain piece of hardward was not found by the computer BTW I just went through something like that with a NIC.

Quote (Harles @ Aug. 31 2006, 2:43 pm)

Maybe the HP versions of XP are coded to only install with the original hard drive.

Yes hardware changes have been made, but nothing that didn't work before the new HD was put in.

Quote

Maybe the HP versions of XP are coded to only install with the original hard drive.

No thats not the case. I recently replaced the hard drive in my hp desktop and had no trouble running the recovery cds.

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.