Recovery Disc issue after HDD replacement

I have a gateway laptop that was purchased in 2005. When I first ran it I was prompted to create a recovery disc. After getting all my settings the way I wanted and installing all the software I wanted I went through the process and everything worked without any apparent error. Fast forward to last week, hard drive failure, started out as "missing operating system" message, then hard drive started making knocking sound. I replaced the drive, but now the DVD that I made using the recovery disc software doesn't seem to be bootable.

When I bootup the laptop with the DVD in the drive there aren't any recovery options that come up. It's almost as if the DVD itself is not bootable. I made sure the BIOS was set to boot to CDRom first, I've also tried F9(which ever option brings up the boot menu) and selected boot to CDRom and it still comes up with the "missing operating system" error message.

I went to Gateways website and tried to chat with a technician, but when I type in my serial number it tells me my laptop was bought from the business division which was sold to MPC Corporation, which seems to be some company that went bankrupt and doesn't seem to exist anymore.

I've popped the disc into my other computer and It appears to have several gigs of information on it. Including an I386 directory and an I386e directory. I haven't tried booting to it from my other computer, I didn't have time this morning to really dig into this. Also I'm at work and don't have the model information. When I get back home I'll update the post with more information.

My needs are quite basic, so I really don't want to have to buy a new OS for this laptop and since I know I created the recovery disc I should have a fully setup image to just load back onto the hard drive, making the recovery process a lot less painful. At least that was the theory I had when I created the recovery discs in the first place. In hindsight I probably should have tried to boot from the discs right after I created them to make sure they worked.

Does anyone out there know what program came on these laptops to create the recovery discs? Anyone know how I can boot to this DVD to start the recovery process? Is this recovery process failing because I'm missing the recovery partition from the original hard drive (I don't even recall if it had a recovery partition)?

Anyone have any ideas at all on how I can resolve this mess?