System restore after HDD replacement

Hi, I have an HP a6230n Pavilion, the drive crashed and I put in a new western digital WD5000. It showns up in the BIOS fine, but I cannot restore the system from the CD's HP sent me. O/S is Vista home 32bit.. I changed the boot sequence to CD first, still noting,, keep getting the DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERET SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER message... Anyone have experience with this? Wondering if I have to by an HP drive.. Any help would be greatly appreciated..
 
The type of drive doesn't matter. Did you make sure you've connected the new drive correctly? Check to be sure nothing was disconnected when you installed the new drive.

What is on the CD's that HP sent? Are they bootable Vista DVDs/CDs or some type of recovery discs? Do you have access to a bootable CD/DVD like another version of Windows just to see if the optical drive can boot it?
 
Yep, the new drive is reconized in the BIOS.. I put my XP Pro cd in the drive, came up no problem at all just to see if the cd was working, cancelled out of that..

HP sent me the recovery set for the machine, s/n, model etc with Vista on it.. I would assume..

I am stumpted.. I pluged the CD into my other computer and it doesn't do anything, but I can read it.. cant find any executibles on it.. 3 disck set.. think HP has something going on here.. I could go buy Vista and reinstall it, but WTH, already paid for it..

Thanks for answering..
 
Apart from asking you to individually check what the CD's say on their covers, and looking at each to search for an executable file in the root of the CD, (which can be an .inf, .msi, html, .com as well as .exe - I don't know which applies on a Vista install set), your problem can only be really answerewd by HP.

Try sending them an email with a DIR listing from each CD.

Only other possibility I can suggest is that an HP PC could be set up in such a way that the CD must be defined as 1st device on the drive channel (or master in other words), which would also imply it must be on a separate channel to the main HDD.

Occasionally, it can be confusing if there are two types of drive channel in the same PC, as in IDE for the CD/DVD and SATA for the HDD. It is possible to see the CD as first on the IDE channel, but the SATA channel is the one defined to boot from....
 
Thanks again for the response! pretty sure the CD is set to boot, I will check one more time... I contacted HP and they actually sent me another recovery set thinking the first may have been bad, now I have 2 that do not work.. very strange.. I'm thinking they may be looking for the factory drive even if it is hammered, but then again that doesn't make sense. Shops change drives all the time.. There is a local shop here, I'm gonna ask then to take a look if it doesn't cost alot, heck, I did most of the work already,, called Geek Squad, guy was rambling off all these fee's, he had the price over 300 bucks, time for a new tower at that point.. If I get it working will post the solution..
 
As I understand you, your CD drive works, is set as bootable, and will indeed boot from a bootable CD

The CDs sent to you will not boot in the same setup, and not on an alternative PC either.

Then (as Holmes might say), the CD set supplied by HP is wrong or incomplete.
 
gbhall,, I agree.. HP stinks.. pay for the O/S, should not have to pay again, but it sure looks that way.. Thanks for the response
 
Back