Replacing HD HP laptop and using recovery discs

The laptop is a dv2810us entertainment notebook. It had a 250 gig WD serial At HD originally. 58 days out of warranty it locked up would not restart or run. I had a 40 gig Seagate laying around so I put it in until I could purchase a replacement. I used the recovery disks HP sent me to re-install Vista,O.S. Worked fine. I just purchased a Fujitsu 80 gig HD and installed it. This is the one that I can not get the disks to work on. I'm not sure if HP has different disks that they send out, as in some that are good for ANY number of uses or if maybe they have limits as Microsoft puts on their software now limiting your use of it without buying another license for them. I did not partition the HD as I only use it while away from home,not my full time puter. I've not used my XP disk for some time and possibly it may have a bad spot on it keeping it from installing on the laptop. I am not sure if Vista is backwards compatible with XP either. Regardless,I am disabled now,wish to buy another copy of XP Pro before it is unavailable to all of us for my personal use. Money is not as plentifull as it always has been before my illness and I must cut all corners when I can,if you can understand that. Thanks for reading my post and I truly hope you or anyone else can help me. I can attempt to push any and all F buttons to get around part of this (like F-11 to reach recovery console) and none will help me. Only F-8 to give me the standard options.

I forgot the HD has not been partitioned as I only use it away from home and do not need to.

So let's cover a few small details.

1. When we use restore media, try to not trip them up by partitioning ahead of time.

2. Try GPARTED and remove all partitions (see bing or google.)

3. As to XP, tell me about what floppy drive and driver you used since XP does not install without that or on some machines where you can enable IDE emulation. I will NOT write in depth about this as there is far too much written about this.

4. The restore media I have from HP worked dozens of times. Explainer. I work in software development and our guinea pig machine gets a reload weekly it seems.

5. Just the facts please. Telling other than what we need to work the issue derails the effort. I have to pick out the facts.

6. On the new drive, put the speed limit 1.5 gigabit jumper on and retest.

I did not partition this new HD. I was using my installation CD for Windows XP Pro that did would not install.

No need for me to write why. It's a well worn topic.

As to you creating a partition. Who's to say that this drive needs a little preparation because it was not blank, ready to use? Let me ask why we would not get GPARTED to have a look?