I have an HP media center m7760n and decided to recover vista from the recovery drive after experiencing a lot of performance issues. The recovery didn't work, so I decided to use my recovery disks I made when I first bought the computer. They too gave me a ton of warnings. I'm at a point where I just want to get the computer working again so I tried to install XP with an old retail copy (2002) I own. When I boot from disk, the setup tells me a problem has been detected and it shuts down. It typically just formats c: so I'm not sure what's up with this. I ran all the HP diagnostic tools (disk, memory, etc.) and they point to no problems. I'd like just format c: and try to install XP again but I don't know how to get to a command line on the HP system to do this. Any suggestions?

The recovery didn't work, so I decided to use my recovery disks I made when I first bought the computer. They too gave me a ton of warnings.

We need more info...
Why recovery partition didn't work? What happened?
What were the warnings when you ran recovery disks.

I tried restoring using the recovery disks again yesterday. This time, I noticed an "Error 1005" when I was 99% finished. I clicked OK on the message and it took me to windows recovery, which then told me it couldn't fix the problem, and then turned my machine off. I booted from a retail XP disk this morning to try to install XP, but once again, I received a message that it couldn't install windows. I'm thinking my hard drive is toast. Note I ran all the HP utilities to check for hardware problems prior to running the restore and all checked out OK.

Run hard drive diagnostics: Hard Drive Diagnostics Tools and Utilities (Storage) - TACKtech Corp.