Post recovery disk usage, computer will not reboot

[RobertBurnie]

My computer was having speed and crashing issues, i did a recovery to the factory reset using the recovery disks that came with my computer when I purchased it.

The recvoery seemed to go fine.   I booted the computer with disk one, it ran and then asked for disk two, then installed the files downloaded, all great.  Then it said press continue for further installation, your computer will restart multiple times through the process.

I pressed continue and my computer will not reboot but quickly moves to the following message:

Boot device not found

Please install an operationg system on your hard drive

Hard Disk (3F0)

I know this is a popular message so  have tried everything I could read online:

1)  all types of boot order variations from the system menu (F10)

2) removing the hard drive and putting it back in (per HP)

3) doing the recovery process with the disks a second and now third time

My hard drive passes all the tests, it is located by the computer, it has no problems quickly being used for the recover process.  But vista does not start.

There were no startup issues prior to the recovery exercise, so I feel the issues with start up is there.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Rob

[RobertBurnie]

If the only person replying to this post is the guy who posted it, does that mean there is no answer or am I doing it wrong?

[Huffer]

You have tried everything we could possibly tell you to do. My guess is that you got a bad set of recovery disks. If I came across this I might try a Windows preboot environment disk like Hirens that will allow you to boot the computer and run some utitlities and diagnostics and see if maybe the hard drive is not set as "active" thus preventing it from booting. Not much more you can do. And that is a very remote possibility, anyway.

You can get a licensed Windows 7 downloadable .iso image and Key Code on eBay for maybe $30 and I might suggest it is time to move on past Vista.