Sony Recovery disks (new member)

I am assisting a coworker with her sons laptop that recently had a defective hard drive. The hard drive being under warranty was replaced by western digital. Upon starting and running recovery disk I was receiving the response talked about in most threads," Recovery could not locate hard drive letter". I did some research and ultimately figured it was a format issue as the drive was new therefore it hadnt been prepped with a drive letter.

I do not have a windows 7 disk as the recover set is supposed to restore to factory settings. I attempted to install windows XP but ran into a blue screen of death error. I have a version of Windows Vista Ultimate with out an access code that was able to install and the drive is not NTSF.

I also ran western digital boot software since the windows vista ultimate wasnt saving to the hard drive on the first install. Now when I turn on the laptop it begins with a black screen that rolls within 1 second a series of text/numbers in gray before refreshing to load windows vista.

At this point since I am able to access windows Vista Ultimate and the drive is identified upon accessing windows as C: drive I assumed I wouldnt have an issue with loading the recovery discs at start.

I ran the recovery disc at start and I receive the same error concerning recovery could not find hard drive letter.

I can attempt to borrow Windows 7 from a collegue and try to upload since there should be a registration code under the laptop. I am just thinking that maybe there is a simpler way to fix this utilizing the recovery discs which were paid for by my friend the last time they were have issues.

Any assistance or recommendations are highly appreciated, also if I have incorrectly used the forum or failed to follow forum standards please let me know so I can correctly posts this item.

thanks,