Im running an HP pavilion desktop pc, and after fighting with HP tech for quite sometime, and not being under warranty either i have the following problem....

i have the correct recovery disks... they dont work for my pc...
I have a set of the wrong ones they sent me, but they do work and my pc will boot from it but it will get stuck on a setup screen and want go any further.

I try to boot from the correct CD's under the manufacturers options and that boot doesnt go well at all... so im left with a computer that has windows on it, its just stuck on the one time setup process screen... blah blah blah....

So ive tried pretty much everything, replacing the harddrive, reformatting several times, trying to boot from just the windows XP cd and manually installing the drivers and nothing seems to be working....

Im thinking its because im using the wrong recovery cds for my computer is the reason its not working. Whatever the case is it cannot be good, HP tells me that in order to fix my problem so the computer will recover properly w/ the correct CD's the motherboard needs to be tatooed with the correct information so it will boot properly. (Not being under warranty this is 290$) And considering i have no idea why the recovery disks wouldnt work for my computer, (i have not done anything internally to my computer whatsoever) so i still believe its a manufacturer's fault they dont work with my computer.

But anyways, i was wandering if flashing the bios would correct this issue of not being able to recovery from the correct CD's and if it would recovery properly.....

Any suggestions? comments? concerns? am i even going in the right directions by even talking about the bios? I talked with a tech guy and he didnt even know what motherboard tatooing was, im still confused on it too.

Please whatever information you could give me on my issue, or a concern or ANYTHING. I would be more than happy.

(Thank you for even taking the time to READ this wall of text) i cant express my gratitude for anything provided. ( dont go HP ) >:-(

(ps the mooninites didnt blow up anything)

you could use a boot floppy and format the drive and reinstall windows off original windows CD you can get a boot disk here Bootdisk.Com

I tried that once already from a windoes XP sp 2 disk, and i got some errors in the installation, should i do anything prior to trying that again?

sorry for double post
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I got one of the Boot disks, i got the windows service pack 2, and when i ran it, i setup the partition and it installed until it got passed the windows loading screen, and i get a CRC error with 39 minutes remaining in the setup, and the setup will no longer continue