Trying to run the recovery program on a HP Pavilion 9680C for a friend and I keep getting the following error "this cd contains a backup of the software originally installed on an hp pavilion pc and can only be used with an hp pavilion pc. If you are receiving this messae on an hp pavilion, please call hp support." My friend calls hp and then send a new recovery cd but we still get the same error. No one on the hp support team could resolve this. One even said that the bios on the motherboard was not in synch with the motherboard which made no sense to me. So I looked for the latest bios to upgrade for this model and there were none. Has anyone seen this, and do you know the fix for this. I'm trying to upgrade the pc for my friend to XP but I need to install the recovery disk first. Please help. Thanks

I'm no expert on this stuff, but the thing is, these unbelieveably insulting recovery CD's sometimes have these problems. They boot, and look for little key things in the bios (and maybe other places) on your computer to "verify" that this is in fact the correct model.

I would pull the bios battery--the simplest way on a "dead" machine to do a bios reset.

Pull out ANY add on cards that were installed--modems, net cards, whatever. If the CDROM has been replaced, say the original CDROM replaced with a CDRW, put the original back in if you have it. If that does not work, I'd even scare up a different hard drive--just for test.

Do you know that the computer has no hardware problems, in other words, why is it that you are running the recovery in the first place? There may be some failure or other that is causing this problem and may be in fact related to why you "feel the need" to run recovery.

Has the system been repaired, specifically has the motherboard been replaced? On HP's if the motherboard gets replaced the technician needs to run what is referred to as a TATOO program on the PC. This serializes the motherboard. If it has not been done the restore will not work correctly. This is not a program that is on the HP download site. Service centers and onsite technicians have copies of the program. Doing onsite support for HP among others I have seen this symptom before.

Richard