[Fred Jacobs]

I am working on a HP Pavillion XT963 that I am trying to recovery from the Recovery CDs. I am 99% sure that all of the hardware is working properly because I can load WIN98 on the system and it works fine. I ordered the Recovery Disks from HP and they do not work. It throws the system into a setup loop.

You put the first recovery disk in and boot from the cd. It then says press "R" to show recovery options. You press "R" and get three options. One is "R" to recover the pc. Two is "F" to format and then restore pc to original factory settings. Three is "Q" to quit and this wiil then boot from the hard drive.

Every once in a while you get to the "recovery software", it starts and then reboots. Most of the time it says it will start the recvery process and the reboot. the BIOS sees the hard drive as the primary master and I have tried to replace it. Same problem. I replaced RAM, and CDROM also and same problem.

I have been on the phone with HP and they fianally stopped with the "software" support and told me it was my hardware. I have loaded WIN98 adn it worked as well as put a WIN95 hard drive in it and it worked as well.

I have formated, FDISK, and FDISK /MBR the drive and it still loops back to the start of the recovery. The system seems to work fine and I don't want to tell the owner to buy a new pc because it is a 1.2GHz processor and it works fine for them.