Okay, great. The CDs do infact contain all of the info; I remember reading that when I made them (my computer gave me the option when I first booted it up of creating backup discs in case of a failure of the recovery partition). If worst comes to worst, I found a pretty cheap copy of XP 2005 so I can just get that and install it. Obviously I would rather have this work. I'll post again letting you whether or not formatting the drive worked in case you are interested.