I have had my laptop for 2 years, it was getting full of rubbish so I decided to re-format my hard drive. I changed the boot options to boot from my internal optical drive first, inserted the recovery disc that I received with the laptop, then restarted. Everytime I have tried this it just boots from the hard disc and loads as normal. The optical drive works fine in Windows and when it boots you can hear the disc spinning. I have updated the bios and all other available updates from HP but still to no avail! thanks eckfox

Did you try setting the optical drive to be the only boot device without all the others? Are you absolutely sure your disk is bootable? Matt www.bbcomputing.co.uk matt@bbcomputing.co.uk

Yep the disc works fine in Windows, but it wont let me boot from there as the version on the disc doesnt have sp2 on it so says it is an older version, I tried removing sp2 but still the same. In the BIOS on this laptop the only choice you get is to swap the boot devices around not disable 1 of them. This is the first boot option I've seen like this, thought it was a bit strange myself! cheers eckfox

I know ill get flak for sayin this but have u tried ringin hp tech support? (hides under table dodging flaming arrow) Are there any options on the recovery disk to do a format from there? Matt www.bbcomputing.co.uk matt@bbcomputing.co.uk

Yep tried phoning hp, they were no use and eventually suggested sending the laptop back to them but as the warranty has run out and it works fine I feel that this is a bit excessive. Only options on the recovery disc when you open it from Windows is to install XP, when you do this you get a message 'cannot install this version of xp as there is a newer version on this computer'

As its a recovery CD i dont know wheher yours has a full version of windows on it. If it has, quick call to HP should tell you, then you can try getting a dos boot disk and trying to boot from the disk once you are in there. Hopefully it should then ask you to format it and create a new partition. Matt www.bbcomputing.co.uk matt@bbcomputing.co.uk

not sure if its a boot disc, the disc says on it 'operating system cd microsoft windows xp professional sp1 Only problem trying boot discs is that i've tried other xp original discs to see if the optical drive picked them up and started loading with the same results. I dont have a floppy drive on my laptop to try floppy boot discs which i've used on my pc previously. cheers eckfox