major problems

[leavesrgolden]

A friend of mine gave me his computer with these problems. He received the recovery disks kit for a compaq presario s5000cl with xp home edition. He got some virus on the computer and decided to do a full recovery. Well needless to say the recovery disks will not finish the recovery. Everytime you go on the first recovery screen it says system recovery enviroment is not complete and insert one of the cds and when you do it still will not finish. How do I solve this problem? Or is the computer trash?

[photolady]

Because of the virus, you'll need to format the drive, not do a recovery. Virsuses can stop xp from loading, or being reloaded.

[Rich M]

I hope we don't get bogged down here in semantics...a recovery set should reformat the hard drive. Do you not get a warning if you proceed further everything will be erased? If not and you reformat with something else how will you install XP?
You might need to purchase an XP cd which will format and partition the drive and install XP but it has no programs on it so you would have to add your own. Providing you have a copy of any Windows OS on CD, not a restore disk, you can get away with cheapest Update XP and still do a full install with it.
http://www.michaelstevenstech.com/cleanxpinstall.html