I bought a new comp recently (hp pavilion 751n, win XP, intel inside pentium 4) It came with a HP Pavilion System Recovery. I have another computer I bought about 3 or 4 years ago, its a hp pavilion 6630, win 98 intel inside celeron processor <- that comp is messed up right now and I don't have the disks for it, Can I use the HP pavilion system recovery disk from the XP comp for the 98 comp? The disks says it can only be used with an HP pavilion PC. They both are HP pavilion pcs, but differnt microsoft thing(98 and XP), does that matter?

Try it and see. If the pc is truly messed up, what harm can be done?

You might not be able to but as madman says.. try it and see. Nothing to lose. Another thing you can look at is http://www.easydesksoftware.com/down.htm#Recovery You can create a windows cd from your good system to use on the buggy one.

The HP recovery disk does more that just install an operating system. The HP recovery does everything except create a dialup number for you. It installs and configures ALL your hardware drivers for all your hardware inside that computer. So if you have another computer using it you're going to end up with alot of misconfigured stuff like your video, sound, modem, network card and so on and so on.... Like others said, can't hurt, but it's gonna leave you with more work in the end. And also if your older computer is not at least a 400mhz and has at least 256megs of ram, then WinXP is gonna have a hard time running on it. I was told those are the minimum specs for XP, that's why I still run 98SE on my pc's.

I completely missed the part about XP. Since XP can only be installed to one machine thanks to product acitvation i dont think you should even bother with trying to use it on the other machine. Also.. i dont think HP's that came with XP have a recovery disk set either. The recovery files are stored on the HD. The disk you have might just be a 'helper' disk to start the installation from the files on the HD.