Doby

Hp puts there OS recovery on a separate partition on the hdd, it is the the users responsibility to create the recovery disks.

Try this, tap F10 at boot up and see if you can access the recovery partition. If you can, reinstall, even if you receive errors. If you can successfully do this and windows works you can then create the cd's to restore XP.

This is a one time process and its located somewhere in the start menu, if you get these disks created you can then install a new hdd and use them to install windows