Perhaps your recovery CD is bad. This happened to me with my Sony Viao. I ended up having to buy a replacement set from Sony for around $30.
hey everyone. i'm trying to reformat my older hp pavilion zt1180 with it's recovery disks. i'm having trouble doing it. after making the cd drive load before the hd, it tells me it does not see a "bootable restore cd"...anything i should try before giving up?

Chowhound
Comic Vine
GameFAQs
GameSpot
Giant Bomb
TechRepublic