have bbeen having problems with my pc lately. it's been determined to be a defective hd. the store I bought it from tried to replace the drive but it wouldn't let them load windows.

Is this some kind of trick that hp is somehow coding the hardware so only they can replace it. tia

Was the store you bought it from the original OEM supplier or was HP?

That PC was running XP Media Center Edition. Is that what "they" are trying to reinstall?

ok, I bought an hp m1090n from circuit city. I figured hp originally set it up. CC made backup recovery dvd's from my original drive and tried to recover the new hard drive from those dvd's